On April 6, 2022, Prof. Geng Lisheng’s group from the School of Physics, together with collaborators from Peking University and Technical University of Munich, published an article titled “Accurate Relativistic Chiral Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction up to Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order” in Physical Review Letters, reporting the significant progress they made in nuclear forces. They constructed the first accurate relativistic chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction based on covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory.

The nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction plays an essential role in our microscopic understanding of nuclear physics. Starting from the pioneering works of Nobel Prize winner Weinberg in early 1990s, chiral effective field theory (ChEFT) has been successfully applied to derive the NN interaction. Nowadays, the chiral nuclear forces have been constructed and reached the level of the most refined phenomenological forces. Nonetheless, these forces are based on the nonrelativistic (NR) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory (ChPT) and cannot be used in relativistic many-body studies. In 2016, Prof. Geng Lisheng and his collaborators proposed the conception of constructing a relativistic chiral nuclear force for the first time. After more than five years of unremitting efforts, they solved several technical difficulties, constructed the first accurate relativistic chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction, achieved a precise description of the n p phase shifts, providing the most essential inputs for relativistic ab initio studies of nuclear structure and reactions, which has been in need for almost two decades.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Education, Beihang University, etc.

Link to the article:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.142002

Reported by Liu Rui

Reviewed by Li Guangchao

Edited by Jia Aiping

Translated by Wen Li