Speaker
Description
The synthesis of elements in environments such as stellar interiors and the early universe proceeds through nuclear fusion. The signatures of these processes, such as neutrino fluxes and elemental abundances, depend sensitively on nuclear reaction rates. A persistent tension between observational data and theoretical predictions highlights the importance of reducing uncertainties in these rates, which currently dominate the error budget in many astrophysical models. Direct measurements of fusion cross sections at the relevant low energies are notoriously difficult due to the Coulomb repulsion between reacting nuclei. As a result, reliable theoretical extrapolations from higher-energy data are essential. In this talk, I will present ab initio calculations of solar-fusion reactions using the no-core shell model with continuum (NCSMC), starting from two- and three-nucleon interactions derived from chiral effective field theory.
