Nuclear matter calculations with chiral interactions .

Using two-nucleon and three-nucleon interactions derived in the framework of chiral perturbation theory (ChPT) with and without the explicit Δ isobar contributions, we calculate the energy per particle of symmetric nuclear matter and pure neutron matter employing the microscopic Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approach. Specifically, we present nuclear matter calculations using the new fully local in coordinate-space two-nucleon interaction at the next-to-next-to-next-to-leading-order (N3LO) of ChPT with Δ isobar intermediate states (N3LOΔ) recently developed by Piarulli et al. [1] supplemented with a local N2LO three-nucleon interaction with explicit Δ isobar degrees of freedom. We show that for this combination of two- and three-nucleon interactions it is possible to obtain a good saturation point of symmetric nuclear matter. We also calculate the nuclear symmetry energy and compare our results with the available empirical constraints on this quantity.