The principal focus of this project is on the development of an angular-momentum-conserving variant of the Density Matrix Renormalization Group for application to nuclear structure. This method has the potential of dramatically expanding the range of nuclei that can be described microscopically using the shell model. A graduate student at the University of Delaware will participate fully in this project, as part of his Ph.D. thesis research. Through his involvement, the student will not only be exposed to forefront research in nuclear structure theory but also to the most modern computational methodologies.
A second focus of the project involves the use of exactly solvable models to gain new insight into the collective features exhibited by nuclei and other strongly-interacting quantum systems. Issues of particular relevance to nuclei that will be addressed include the role of proton-neutron pairing in nuclei near N=Z and the importance of treating pairing exactly in microscopic mean field theories.
