![Figure 1: Left panel: Nuclei in the nuclear chart, with the CRC highlight calculation of 100 Sn marked with a star. The blue squares represent all known nuclei, with stable nuclei in darker blue. More than half of the nuclear chart is unknown1. Right panel: Chiral EFT for nuclear forces, where the different contributions at successive orders are shown diagrammatically. Nucleons and pions are represented by solid and dashed lines, respectively. Many-body forces are highlighted in orange including the year they were derived. In the first funding period, we achieved the first ab initio calculations of nuclei including all 3N forces up to N3LO.](/media/ikp/responsivedesign/verbundprojekte/sfb_1245/Intro-Bild.png)
![Figure 1: Left panel: Nuclei in the nuclear chart, with the CRC highlight calculation of 100 Sn marked with a star. The blue squares represent all known nuclei, with stable nuclei in darker blue. More than half of the nuclear chart is unknown1. Right panel: Chiral EFT for nuclear forces, where the different contributions at successive orders are shown diagrammatically. Nucleons and pions are represented by solid and dashed lines, respectively. Many-body forces are highlighted in orange including the year they were derived. In the first funding period, we achieved the first ab initio calculations of nuclei including all 3N forces up to N3LO.](/media/ikp/responsivedesign/verbundprojekte/sfb_1245/Intro-Bild_475x0.png)
[1] J. Erler, N. Birge, M. Kortelainen, W. Nazarewicz, W. Olsen, A.M. Perhac, and M. Stoitsov, The limits of the nuclear landscape, Nature 468, 509 (2012).
Institute for Nuclear Physics
Nuclear structure theory has evolved into a field with a systematic theoretical foundation, with nuclear forces based on QCD and advanced methods to solve the nuclear many-body problem with controlled uncertainties. Effective field theories (EFT), first proposed in the pioneering work by Steven Weinberg, have played a guiding role in this process, as they reduce the complexity of the underlying QCD theory to the relevant degrees of freedom in a systematic way. While this was first demonstrated for light nuclei, we have shown in the first funding period that this approach can be successfully extended to medium-mass and heavy nuclei. Research performed in this direction has the ultimate goal to understand the nuclear chart from first principles. Since the properties of nuclei, their existence, excitations and decays are all encoded in the nuclear chart, it represents the boundary condition for the complete evolution of known matter from the Big Bang to today.
[1] J. Erler, N. Birge, M. Kortelainen, W. Nazarewicz, W. Olsen, A.M. Perhac, and M. Stoitsov, The limits of the nuclear landscape, Nature 468, 509 (2012).