Search

We present strategies to quantify theoretical uncertainties in modern ab initio calculations of electromagnetic observables in light and medium-mass nuclei. We discuss how uncertainties build up from various sources, such as the approximations introduced by the few- or many-body solver and the truncation of the chiral effective field theory expansion. We review the recent progress encompassing a broad range of electromagnetic observables in stable and unstable nuclei.

With the goal of using chiral interactions at various orders to explore the properties of the few-body nuclear systems, we write the recently developed local chiral interactions as spherical irreducible tensors and implement them in the hyperspherical harmonics expansion method. We devote particular attention to three-body forces at next-to-next-to leading order, which play an important role in reproducing experimental data. We check our implementation by benchmarking the ground-state properties of 3H, 3He, and 4He against the available Monte Carlo calculations. We then confirm their order-by-order truncation error estimates and further investigate uncertainties in the charge radii obtained by using the precise muonic atom data for single-nucleon radii. Having local chiral Hamiltonians at various orders implemented in our hyperspherical harmonics suites of codes opens up the possibility to test such interactions on other light-nuclei properties, such as electromagnetic reactions.

In view of the future plans to measure the Lamb shift in muonic Lithium atoms we address the microscopic theory of the $\mu$-$^6$Li$^{2+}$ and $\mu$-$^7$Li$^{2+}$ systems. The goal of the CREMA collaboration is to measure the Lamb shift to extract the charge radius with high precision and compare it to electron scattering data or atomic spectroscopy to see if interesting puzzles, such as the proton and deuteron radius puzzles, arise. For this experiment to be successful, theoretical information on the nuclear structure corrections to the Lamb shift is needed. For $\mu$-$^6$Li$^{2+}$ and $\mu$-$^7$Li$^{2+}$ there exist only estimates of nuclear structure corrections based on experimental data that suffer from very large uncertainties. We present the first steps towards an ab initio computation of these quantities using few-body techniques.