Abstract
New energy-density functionals (EDFs) inspired by effective-field theories have been recently proposed. The present work focuses on three such functionals, which were developed to produce satisfactory equations of state for nuclear matter. We aim to extend these functionals to treat finite systems including a spin-orbit contribution and pairing correlations. We illustrate here a first step toward this direction, namely a generalization of such functionals tailored to perform applications to neutron gases confined in harmonic traps. Sets of available ab initio results are used as benchmark pseudodata for adjusting the additional parameters (with respect to the nuclear matter case) that have to be introduced for finite-size systems. Several quantities are predicted and compared to ab initio and other EDF results such as total energies, potentials, and density profiles. The associated effective masses are also analyzed. Two of these functionals globally provide predictions that are close to one another as well as to ab initio values when available. It is shown that, in general, this is not the case for several currently used Skyrme functionals. Directions for improving the third functional are discussed.
3 More- Received 5 June 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.98.034319
©2018 American Physical Society