J. Bonnard, M. Grasso, D. Lacroix

Physical Review C 101, 064319 (2020)

The ELYO (extended Lee-Yang-Orsay) functional proposed in M. Grasso, D. Lacroix, and C. J. Yang [Phys. Rev. C 95, 054327 (2017)] belongs to the family of energy-density functionals (EDFs) inspired by effective-field theories and constrained by ab initio pseudodata. We present here an extension of this EDF which also accounts for the first p-wave term appearing in the low-density expansion from which it derives. It is shown that this enrichment of the ansatz on which the functional is based leads to a significant improvement of the description of neutronic systems, especially in regimes besides the pseudodata set employed to adjust the parameters. As an illustrative application, the mass-radius relation of neutron stars is considered. In contrast to its initial version, the new functional predicts values which are qualitatively consistent with recent observations.

2020-06-22 15:09