Local chiral potentials with Δ intermediate states and the structure of light nuclei

We present fully local versions of the minimally nonlocal nucleon-nucleon potentials constructed in a previous paper [Piarulli et al, Phys.Rev.C 91, 024003 (2015)], and use them in hypersperical harmonics and quantum Monte Carlo calculations of ground and excited states of H-3, He-3, He-4, He-6, and Li-6 nuclei. The long-range part of these local potentials includes one- and two-pion exchange contributions without and with Delta isobars in the intermediate states up to order Q3 (Q denotes generically the low momentum scale) in the chiral expansion, while the short-range part consists of contact interactions up to order Q4. The low-energy constants multiplying these contact interactions are fitted to the 2013 Granada database in two different ranges of laboratory energies, either 0–125 MeV or 0–200 MeV, and to the deuteron binding energy and nn singlet scattering length. Fits to these data are performed for three models characterized by long- and short-range cutoffs, RL and RS, respectively, ranging from (RL,RS)=(1.2,0.8) fm down to (0.8,0.6) fm. The long-range (short-range) cutoff regularizes the one- and two-pion exchange (contact) part of the potential.