Overview

Nuclear theory research at Notre Dame addresses the origin of the elements and the strongly correlated motion of nucleons within the nucleus, through investigations in theoretical nuclear astrophysics and nuclear structure physics. In nuclear astrophysics, we probe the properties of nuclei and nuclear matter under extremes of temperature and density, in order to constrain nuclear physics, astrophysical environments, and non-standard model physics. In nuclear structure, we seek to understand the emergence of simple patterns, such as quantal rotational and vibrational modes, through ab initio and collective approaches, in nuclei from the very lightest to the heaviest and to the limits of stability.

News & Events

• Colloquium: Dean Lee January 2018 Nuclear theorist Dean Lee of Michigan State University is giving the January 31, 2018, departmental colloquium Lattice simulations for nuclear physics.

• Caprio to serve as Associate Editor for European Physical Journal A November 2017 Mark Caprio has been selected to serve as an Associate Editor, in the area of Nuclear Theory, for the European Physical Journal A: Hadrons and Nuclei. This is the European Physical Society journal for nuclear physics, which was established as the successor to several European national journals, including Zeitschrift fuer Physik A and Il Nuovo Cimento A. Caprio will serve a three-year term on the editorial board.

• REU student Julie Butler participates in Conference Experience for Undergraduates October 2017 Our Summer 2017 Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) student Julie Butler, from Erskine College, participated in the Conference Experience for Undergraduates program at the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics meeting in Pittsburgh, where she presented the results of her REU project. In her REU work at Notre Dame, mentored by Mark Caprio and Patrick Fasano, she had compared the ability of ab initio nuclear structure calculations to predict experimentally observed rotational band properties in light nuclei, for calculations based on different realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions.

• Anna McCoy thesis defense August 2017 Graduate student Anna McCoy defended her thesis Ab initio multi-irrep symplectic no-core configuration interaction calculations, completed under the supervision of Mark Caprio, on August 16, 2017. Anna developed an ab initio symplectic no-core configuration interaction (SpNCCI) framework for nuclear structure calculations of light nuclei, which makes use of the approximate Sp(3,R) many-body symmetry of nuclei to obtain accelerated convergence. She demonstrated the prevalence of Sp(3,R) symmetry throughout the low-lying nuclear excitation spectrum.

• TRIUMF ab initio workshop February 2017 Mark Caprio and graduate student Anna McCoy participated in the international workshop Progress in Ab Initio Techniques in Nuclear Physics at TRIUMF in Vancouver, British Columbia. They presented initial results of Anna's thesis work on developing an ab initio framework for using symplectic symmetry in the nuclear many-body problem. This work is in collaboration with Tomas Dytrych of the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

• Colloquium: Wick Haxton January 2017 Nuclear theorist Wick Haxton of the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is giving the January 25, 2017, departmental colloquium The nuclear physics of dark matter detection.

• News & Events archive...