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Charged particle scattering in renormalizable pionless effective field theory at next-to-leading order: The , and cases
Phys. Rev. C 113, 024001 – Published 13 February, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/7pp1-tl4f
Abstract
We formulate a renormalizable pionless effective field theory () with a nonperturbative treatment of the Coulomb interaction up to next-to-leading order (NLO) for few-nucleon systems. We extract scattering observables for charged clusters by employing two-, three-, and four-body contact interactions and using the stochastic variational method with a Coulomb-corrected harmonic oscillator trap. Our NLO results yield a spin-quartet scattering length and effective range of and ; for scattering in the spin-quintet channel we find and ; and for scattering the spin-singlet and spin-triplet channels are characterized by and , respectively. Our predictions exhibit mild cutoff dependence and agree well with existing experimental phase shift analyses and potential model calculations. This demonstrates the predictive power of for charged few-nucleon systems.