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Abstract

We study ground-state energies and charge radii of closed-shell medium-mass
nuclei based on novel chiral nucleon-nucleon (NN) and three-nucleon (3N)
interactions, with a focus on exploring the connections between finite nuclei
and nuclear matter. To this end, we perform in-medium similarity
renormalization group (IM-SRG) calculations based on chiral interactions at
next-to-leading order (NLO), N$^2$LO, and N$^3$LO, where the 3N interactions at
N$^2$LO and N$^3$LO are fit to the empirical saturation point of nuclear matter
and to the triton binding energy. Our results for energies and radii at N$^2$LO
and N$^3$LO overlap within uncertainties, and the cutoff variation of the
interactions is within the EFT uncertainty band. We find underbound
ground-state energies, as expected from the comparison to the empirical
saturation point. The radii are systematically too large, but the agreement
with experiment is better. We further explore variations of the 3N couplings to
test their sensitivity in nuclei. While nuclear matter at saturation density is
quite sensitive to the 3N couplings, we find a considerably weaker dependence
in medium-mass nuclei. In addition, we explore a consistent momentum-space SRG
evolution of these NN and 3N interactions, exhibiting improved many-body
convergence. For the SRG-evolved interactions, the sensitivity to the 3N
couplings is found to be stronger in medium-mass nuclei.