Neutron matter at zero temperature with an auxiliary field diffusion Monte Carlo method

The recently developed auxiliary field diffusion Monte Carlo method is applied to compute the equation of state and the compressibility of neutron matter. By combining diffusion Monte Carlo method for the spatial degrees of freedom and auxiliary field Monte Carlo method to separate the spin-isospin operators, quantum Monte Carlo can be used to simulate the ground state of many-nucleon systems (A&100). We use a path constraint to control the fermion sign problem. We have made simulations for realistic interactions, which include tensor and spin-orbit two-body potentials as well as three-nucleon forces. The Argonne v88 and v68 two-nucleon potentials plus the Urbana or Illinois three-nucleon potentials have been used in our calculations. We compare with fermion hypernetted chain results. We report on the results of a periodic box fermi hypernetted chain calculation, which is also used to estimate the finite size corrections to our quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Our auxiliary field diffusion Monte Carlo ~AFDMC! results for v6 models of pure neutron matter are in reasonably good agreement with equivalent correlated basis function ~CBF! calculations, providing energies per particle which are slightly lower than the CBF ones. However, the inclusion of the spin-orbit force leads to quite different results particularly at relatively high densities. The resulting equation of state from AFDMC calculations is harder than the one from previous Fermi hypernetted chain studies commonly used to determine the neutron star structure.