CAREER: Few-Body Physics in Finite Volume

Understanding how subatomic matter organizes itself and gives rise to both our own existence as well as to phenomena observed in the universe is a central goal of nuclear science that is relevant across many areas of physics. With this project, the PI and his collaborators will develop novel theoretical techniques and numerical simulations of quantum systems that will help understand how they are governed by the underlying fundamental forces. This will in particular address exotic corners in the landscape of atomic nuclei, where an effective cluster structure emerges out of the interaction of many constituents. The new methods will be based on the fascinating observation that real-world properties of a physical system can be inferred from studying how it changes with the size of a finite geometry that it is simulated in. They will be relevant not only for nuclear physics, but also for other areas which exhibit very similar structures. The project will support and train both graduate and undergraduate students, and together with the 'Computational Modeling in Physics First with Bootstrap' program it will furthermore enhance high-school physics education. This collaboration will broaden participation in STEM topics through activities that integrate physics and programming skills.

The project will strengthen the connection of nuclear physics to Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental theory of the strong interaction. It will achieve this by studying the connection of different nuclear effective field theories (EFTs), exploiting their overlapping regimes of applicability to leverage predictive power towards exotic rare isotopes with few-body halo or cluster structure. It will furthermore address important questions in the construction of nuclear EFTs by analyzing how precise and accurate nuclear spectra emerge out of systematic expansions of the nuclear force. Finally, it will study nuclear continuum observables (resonances and response functions), covering the richness of nuclear phenomena and addressing the interplay of nuclear states with electromagnetic probes that are used to gather experimental information about nuclei. Finite-volume techniques enable the treatment of all of these aspects in an elegant and unified way, and they furthermore render insights from the project relevant for lattice simulations of QCD or cold atomic systems.

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.