UNC-CH Nuclear Colloquium
Ragnar Stroberg, TRIUMF
“Atomic nuclei from the ground up”
The standard model of particle physics has been astoundingly successful in predicting and interpreting the results of atomic and sub-atomic experiments. However when it comes to atomic nuclei — which make up more than 99% of the mass of visible matter — we don’t yet know how to solve the equations of the standard model to obtain predictions. Nonetheless, substantial progress towards this goal has been made in the past two decades. I will discuss some developments in nuclear many-body theory which enable the treatment of up to approximately 100 particles with controlled uncertainties. Parallel developments of nuclear interactions derived from chiral effective field theory — an effective theory of quantum chromodynamics with pion and nucleon degrees of freedom — place first-principles calculations of nuclear physics within reach. Finally, I will describe some early steps towards applications to searches for physics beyond the standard model, including neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter detection.