LAUSR

We compute the medium-mass nuclei 16O and 40Ca using pion-less effective field theory (EFT) at next-to-leading order (NLO). The low-energy coefficients of the EFT Hamiltonian are adjusted to experimental data for nuclei with mass numbers A=2 and 3, or alternatively to results from lattice quantum chromodynamics at an unphysical pion mass of 806 MeV. The EFT is implemented through a discrete variable representation in the harmonic oscillator basis. This approach ensures rapid convergence with respect to the size of the model space and facilitates the computation of medium-mass nuclei. At NLO the nuclei 16O and 40Ca are bound with respect to decay into alpha particles. Binding energies per nucleon are 9–10 MeV and 21–40 MeV at pion masses of 140 and 806 MeV, respectively.