Analyzing momentum distributions in light nuclei with the operator product expansion
Abstract
We analyze the high-momentum tails of nucleon distributions in nuclei using the operator product expansion (OPE) and Pionless effective field theory. The OPE factorizes the distributions into Wilson coefficients, determined from two-nucleon scattering, and local-operator matrix elements (LOMEs). Because the leading 1S0 and 3S1 Wilson coefficients are nearly degenerate in the single-nucleon distribution, we construct the OPE of the two-nucleon momentum distribution, which separates the two contributions into distinct spin-isospin channels. From variational Monte Carlo two-nucleon distributions of \isotope[3]{He}, \isotope[4]{He}, \isotope[6]{Li}, and \isotope[12]{C}, we extract the LOMEs and accurately reconstruct the single-nucleon distributions at large momenta. In potentials without explicit non-nucleon degrees of freedom such as AV18, the Wilson coefficients of the single- and two-nucleon OPEs are proportional, yielding approximate relations between the two distributions.
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BibTeX
@misc{yu2026analyzing,
title = {{Analyzing momentum distributions in light nuclei with the operator product expansion}},
author = {Jiexin Yu and Bingwei Long},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.08437},
eprint = {2609.08437},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08437},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Analyzing momentum distributions in light nuclei with the operator product expansion
AU - Jiexin Yu
AU - Bingwei Long
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.08437
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08437
AB - We analyze the high-momentum tails of nucleon distributions in nuclei using the operator product expansion (OPE) and Pionless effective field theory. The OPE factorizes the distributions into Wilson coefficients, determined from two-nucleon scattering, and local-operator matrix elements (LOMEs). Because the leading ^1S_0 and ^3S_1 Wilson coefficients are nearly degenerate in the single-nucleon distribution, we construct the OPE of the two-nucleon momentum distribution, which separates the two contributions into distinct spin-isospin channels. From variational Monte Carlo two-nucleon distributions of \isotope[3]{He}, \isotope[4]{He}, \isotope[6]{Li}, and \isotope[12]{C}, we extract the LOMEs and accurately reconstruct the single-nucleon distributions at large momenta. In potentials without explicit non-nucleon degrees of freedom such as AV18, the Wilson coefficients of the single- and two-nucleon OPEs are proportional, yielding approximate relations between the two distributions.
ER -