Semi-local nuclear forces from chiral EFT: State-of-the-art & challenges

Recently, a new generation of nuclear forces has been developed in the framework of chiral EFT. An important feature of these potentials is a novel semi-local regularization approach that combines the advantages of a local regulator for long-range interactions with the convenience of an angle-independent nonlocal regulator for contact interactions. The authors discuss the key features of the semi-local two-nucleon potentials and demonstrate their outstanding performance in the two-nucleon sector by showing selected results up to fifth order in the EFT expansion. Also reviewed are applications to heavier systems, which are currently limited to third chiral order. This limitation reflects the conceptual difficulty in constructing a consistently regularized many-body forces and current operators and affects all currently available interactions. The authors outline possible ways to tackle this problem and discuss future directions in the field.