Ab initio simulations of atomic nuclei: State-of-the-art and future challenges

by Alexander Tichai (TU Darmstadt)

Tuesday 4 Feb 2025, 14:30 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

Over the last 20 years the ab initio description of atomic nuclei has been significantly extended throughout the nuclear chart to heavier and more exotic systems. This success is predominantly due to i) novel many-body techniques and ii) modern nuclear forces derived from chiral effective field theory. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss the current state-of-the-art in ab initio nuclear structure and highlight some of the future grand challenges.

In the second part I will present new ideas for solving the nuclear many-body problem from first principles. I will introduce tensor-network states as an innovative way to address strongly correlated systems. In particular, the so-called density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) approach offers a novel way to target structurally complex systems. Moreover, I will introduce quantum information theory as a toolbox to dissect many-body correlations that allows us to revisit the nuclear phenomenology through the notion of quantum entanglement.

CERN_2025_Tichai.pdf