Lattice effective field theory for medium-mass nuclei

We extend Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory (NLEFT) to medium-mass nuclei, and present results for the ground states of alpha nuclei from He-4 to Si-28, calculated up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in the EFT expansion. This computational advance is made possible by extrapolations of lattice data using multiple initial and final states. For our soft two-nucleon interaction, we find that the overall contribution from multi-nucleon forces must change sign from attractive to repulsive with increasing nucleon number. This effect is not produced by three-nucleon forces at NNLO, but it can be approximated by an effective four-nucleon interaction. We discuss the convergence of the EFT expansion and the broad significance of our findings for future ab initio calculations. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.