Nolen-Schiffer anomaly

The Argonne v18 potential contains a detailed treatment of the pp, pn and nn electromagnetic potential, including Coulomb, vacuum polarization, Darwin Foldy and magnetic moment terms, all with suitable form factors and was fit to pp and pn data using the appropriate nuclear masses. In addition, it contains a nuclear charge-symmetry breaking (CSB) term adjusted to reproduce the difference in the experimental pp and nn scattering lengths. We have used these potential terms to compute differences in the binding energies of mirror isospin-1/2 nuclei (Nolen-Schiffer [NS] anomaly). Variational Monte Carlo calculations for the 3He-3H system and cluster variational Monte Carlo for the 15O-15N and 17F-17O systems were made. In the first case, the best variational wave function for the A = 3 nuclei was used. However, because our 16O wave function does not reproduce accurately the 16O rms radius, to which the NS anomaly is very sensitive, we adjusted the A = 15 and A = 17 wave functions to reproduce the experimental density profiles. Our computed energy differences for these three systems are 0.757 ± .001, 3.544 ± .018 and 3.458 ± .040 MeV respectively, which are to be compared with the experimental differences of 0.764, 3.537, and 3.544 MeV. Most of the theoretical uncertainties are due to uncertainties in the experimental rms radii. The nuclear CSB potential contributes 0.066, 0.188, and 0.090 MeV to these totals. We also attempted calculations for A = 39 and A = 41. However, in these cases, the experimental uncertainties in the rms radius make it impossible to extract useful information about the contribution of the nuclear CSB potential