Accurate nuclear radii and binding energies from a chiral interaction

With the goal of developing predictive ab initio capability for light and medium-mass nuclei, two-nucleon and three-nucleon forces from chiral effective field theory are optimized simultaneously to low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering data, as well as binding energies and radii of few-nucleon systems and selected isotopes of carbon and oxygen. Coupled-cluster calculations based on this interaction, named NNLOₛₐₜ, yield accurate binding energies and radii of nuclei up to ⁴⁰Ca, and are consistent with the empirical saturation point of symmetric nuclear matter. In addition, the low-lying collective J^π=3^- states in ¹⁶O and ⁴⁰Ca are described accurately, while spectra for selected p- and $sd$-shell nuclei are in reasonable agreement with experiment.