Ab initio study of neutron drops with chiral Hamiltonians

Abstract We report ab initio calculations for neutron drops in a 10 MeV external harmonic-oscillator trap using chiral nucleon–nucleon plus three-nucleon interactions. We present total binding energies, internal energies, radii and odd–even energy differences for neutron numbers N = 2 – 18 using the no-core shell model with and without importance truncation. Furthermore, we present total binding energies for N = 8 , 16 , 20 , 28 , 40 , 50 obtained in a coupled-cluster approach. Comparisons with quantum Monte Carlo results, where available, using Argonne v 8 ′ with three-nucleon interactions reveal important dependences on the chosen Hamiltonian.