Nuclear Physics without High-Momentum Potentials: Direct Construction of the Effective Interaction from Scattering Observables

The standard approach to nuclear physics encodes phase shift information in an NN potential, then decodes that information in forming an effective interaction, appropriate to a low-momentum Hilbert space. Here we show that it is instead possible to construct the effective interaction directly from continuum phase shifts and mixing angles, eliminating all reference to a high momentum potential. The theory is rapidly convergent and well behaved, yielding sub-keV accuracy.