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Nuclear Binding Energies and NN uncertainties

There is an increasing interest in quantifying the predictive power in nuclear structure calculations. We discuss how both experimental and systematic errors at the NN-level can be used to estimate the theoretical uncertainties by rather simple means and without solving the full nuclear many body problem. We emphasize the role of effective interactions defined by coarse graining the NN potential to length scales of the order of the minimal de Broglie wavelength probed between nucleons in nuclei. We find an a priori error of \DeltaB/A \sim 0.1 - 0.4MeV for the binding energy per particle throughout the periodic table for 2 \leq A \leq 208, and a linear growth of the error with density for nuclear matter \DeltaB/A \sim 3.75ρn.m. and neutron matter \DeltaB/N \sim 3.5ρn.. This suggests to limit the computational effort in solving the Nuclear Many Body Problem to such an accuracy.