Ab initio pathway to deformed nuclei

Nuclear physics is one of the main drivers for extending our current understanding of Nature, its fundamental forces and the organization of compound systems on subatomic scales.

The description of atomic nuclei and nuclear matter connects microscopic systems to astrophysics and the origin of elements, bridging orders of magnitudes in energy scales.

A precise understanding of the rich nuclear phenomenology and their emergence from the interaction between neutrons and protons impacts various facets of contemporary physics.

Despite tremendous progress over the past decades a fully controlled description of nuclei throughout the entire nuclear chart is still lacking.

In particular many experimentally relevant nuclei reveal exotic shapes and strong deformation where nuclear physicists still rely on the use of phenomenological approaches based on uncontrolled approximations with limited predictive power beyond the regions where they have been adjusted.In my project I will develop new technologies to target deformed nuclei using nuclear interactions derived from chiral effective field theory and study the impact of interaction models on the predicted nuclear shapes.

Combined with a uncertainty quantification of many-body observables this allows for unprecedented predictions of nuclei far away from shell closures significantly extending the scope of first principles nuclear structure calculations.

The novelty and challenge of the proposed research lies in (i) the design of many-body frameworks applicable to deformed nuclei, (ii) statistical analyses for uncertainty quantification and (iii) the establishment of tensor network approaches in ab initio simulations.

This array of developments, puts me in the unique position to tackle the following big research questions: How does nuclear deformation emerge in a first-principles approach? What are the overall uncertainties associated to an ab initio computation? What is the most efficient way of describing exotic nuclei?