Speaker
Description
Recent years have seen enormous progress in ab initio approaches to the nuclear many-body problem, ranging from traditional coordinate and configuration-space methods to Lattice Effective Field Theory (EFT). EFT and renormalization group (RG) techniques have provided new systematic tools to treat the correlations in strongly interacting systems, and to inject ab initio ideas into methods that previously relied on empirical interactions.
As a result, we have seen ab initio forays into the domain of heavy nuclei, including first converged calculations of Pb-208 with two- and three-nucleon interactions from chiral EFT, the generation of mass tables for regions of the nuclear chart, electroweak transitions of interest for fundamental symmetry programs, and some of the most important nuclear interactions in nature.
I will discuss these and selected additional highlights, before looking ahead at the next round of challenges in improving the accuracy and expanding the reach of ab initio methods to deformed and more exotic nuclei. I will also touch upon ideas to tackle these challenges.
