  Nucleon-nucleon potentials evolved to low momentum, which show great promise
in few- and many-body calculations, have generally been formulated with a sharp
cutoff on relative momenta. However, a sharp cutoff has technical disadvantages
and can cause convergence problems at the 10-100 keV level in the deuteron and
triton. This motivates using smooth momentum-space regulators as an
alternative. We generate low-momentum interactions with smooth cutoffs both
through energy-independent renormalization group methods and using a multi-step
process based on the Bloch-Horowitz approach. We find greatly improved
convergence for calculations of the deuteron and triton binding energies in a
harmonic oscillator basis compared to results with a sharp cutoff. Even a
slight evolution of chiral effective field theory interactions to lower momenta
is beneficial. The renormalization group preserves the long-range part of the
interaction, and consequently the renormalization of long-range operators, such
as the quadrupole moment, the radius and 1/r, is small. This demonstrates that
low-energy observables in the deuteron are reproduced without short-range
correlations in the wave function.
