Nucleus-nucleus potentials from local chiral EFT interactions

Abstract We present the first determination of double-folding potentials (DFP) based on chiral effective field theory (EFT) nucleon-nucleon interactions at next-to-next-to-leading order (N2LO). To this end, we construct new two-body soft local chiral EFT interactions. We benchmark this approach in 16O-16O collisions, and extend it to the scattering of 12C-12C. We present results for cross sections computed for elastic scattering at energies up to 1000 MeV, as well as for the astrophysical S factor of the fusion of oxygen isotopes. Thanks to the predictive power of this approach, we can calculate various reaction observables without any adjusting parameters. Our analysis of these various reaction observables has enabled us to study the impact of the nuclear density and the nucleon-nucleon interaction on the corresponding cross sections.