Emergent Complexity from strong Interactions

The least understood part of the so successful Standard Model of the strong and electroweak forcesis the formation of strongly interacting composites, like hadrons, atomic nuclei and hypernuclei.

Inaddition, the nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang and in stars is fine-tuned at various places, whichimmediately leads to the question how much these fine-tunings can be offset to still lead to an habitableuniverse?Over the last decade, the PI and his collaborators have further improved the chiral effective fieldtheory for two- and three-nucleon forces, have pioneered and refined the extension of this approach tobaryon-baryon interactions and, most importantly, have developed nuclear lattice effective field theory,which enabled them to solve longstanding problems in nuclear physics, like the ab initio calculation ofthe Hoyle state in 12C.

Based on these achievements, this proposal will provide answers to: i) whereare the limits of nuclear stability? ii) what hypernuclei can exist, what are their properties and how is the equation of state of neutron matter modied by the presence of strange quarks? and iii) what limits on the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model are set by the fine-tunings in nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang and in stars?Apart from answering these big science questions, the proposal will, as a by-product, develop methodsin effective field theories and Monte Carlo simulations that will be of use in other fields, such as coldatom and condensed matter physics.