Nuclear physics plays a key role in our quest to understand the Universe, addressing fundamental scientific questions like: 1) How did matter come into being and how does it evolve? 2) How does subatomic matter organize itself and what phenomena emerge? 3) Are the fundamental interactions that are basic to the structure of matter fully understood?, and 4) How can the knowledge and technological progress provided by nuclear physics best be used to benefit society? In recent years, researchers have made remarkable progress in our fundamental understanding of the complex and fascinating system that is the nucleus. This progress has been driven by new theoretical insights and increased computational power, as well as by experimental access to new isotopes with a large excess of neutrons or protons. The latter involves large societal investments in scientific forefront experimental facilities like the Facility of Radioactive Ion Beams, which is being built at Michigan State University in the U.S.A. The mentoring of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows is an integral part of the project. Their professional development toward independence as original and productive scientists is a central objective of the project and will continue to prepare them for industry or academic institutions.
While much has been learned so far about nuclear systems and associated phenomena, much remains to be understood. This project aims to advance our basic understanding of subatomic matter by addressing many of the above fundamental questions. For nuclear theorists, the challenge is to develop a comprehensive and unified description of nuclei and their reactions, grounded in the fundamental interactions between the constituent nucleons with quantifiable uncertainties to maximize predictive power. To model such systems according to the laws of motion and the underlying nuclear forces, requires the development of sophisticated physical and mathematical algorithms. To address this challenge, this group will develop a toolbox of methods for dealing with many strongly-interacting particles (protons and neutrons) capable of treating a wide variety of nuclear systems, ranging from stable closed-shell nuclei and nuclear matter as seen in for example neutron stars to exotic loosely-bound neutron and proton rich nuclei far from shell closures. The toolbox will make use of state-of-the-art microscopic inputs and will be built around modern many-particle methods. A premium will be placed on developing reliable theoretical error bars, which stem in part from truncation errors used to derive nuclear forces, uncertainties in the fitted parameters of the input interactions, truncated approximations intended to "soften" the input Hamiltonian, basis-set truncation errors, and truncation errors in the particular level of many-body approximation. By developing powerful many-body methods capable of treating a wide range of nuclear systems with controlled uncertainties, this project will bring us one step closer to being able to answer the above fundamental questions of nuclear physics.
