NSF Award
2209376
Investigation of rare nuclear isotopes becomes the most fascinating topic in the low-energy nuclear physics. Such studies, besides improving the understanding of fundamental interactions, facilitate applications with direct societal impact, including those in medicine, homeland security, and industry. The advent of experimental facilities with beams of unstable atomic nuclei opens up new opportunities in this area of research, such as astrophysical applications for predicting the evolution of stars and galaxies. In this context nuclear theory is engaged to provide missing information about exotic nuclei that is not accessible experimentally. To this effort the project will contribute an implementation of novel ideas on nuclear structure, which will be benchmarked against state-of-the-art experimental data. Training graduate students by engaging them in this research and launching their careers in academia and industry are important components of the project. The novel results will be employed in upgrading the relevant graduate courses, aiming at attracting young talents to the field of nuclear physics.<br/><br/>This project addresses fundamental theoretical questions about microscopic mechanisms of emergent collectivity in many-body quantum systems. The new theoretical method will be developed to derive the collective effects from the underlying nuclear forces. The method will be implemented numerically for the description of nuclear spectra studied at major nuclear physics facilities, such as the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) / Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University and the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Tokyo. Burning issues in the description of nuclear masses and radii will be addressed as well. Upon benchmarking to data, the implementations will be extended to finite temperatures to model the behavior of medium-mass nuclei in stellar environments. This will allow one to obtain a high-quality description of the nuclear reaction rates, which serve as an input for astrophysical modeling of neutron star mergers and supernova explosions. Part of the project will be devoted to quantum computation of prototype systems and search for efficient quantum-classical algorithms for computing atomic nuclei.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
