Can long-range nuclear properties Be influenced by short range interactions? A chiral dynamics estimate.

Recent experiments and many-body calculations indicate that approximately 20% of the nucleons in medium and heavy nuclei (A ≥ 12) are part of short-range correlated (SRC) primarily neutron-proton (np) pairs. We find that using chiral dynamics to account for the formation of np pairs due to the effects of iterated and irreducible two-pion exchange leads to values consistent with the 20% level. We further apply chiral dynamics to study how these correlations influence the calculations of nuclear charge radii, that traditionally truncate their effect, to find that they are capable of introducing non-negligible effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]