Non‐empirical Nuclear Energy Functionals, Pairing Gaps and Odd‐Even Mass Differences

First, we briefly outline some aspects of the starting project to design non‐empirical energy functionals based on low‐momentum vacuum interactions and many‐body perturbation theory. Second, we present results obtained within an approximation of such a scheme where the pairing part of the energy density functional is constructed at first order in the nuclear plus Coulomb two‐body interaction. We discuss in detail the physics of the odd‐even mass staggering and the necessity to compute actual odd‐even mass differences to analyze it meaningfully.