Progress in the First Principles Calculation of Nuclear Structure Observables

Abstract:  In the past decade, concurrent advances in nuclear interactions, many body methods and computational power have launched an explosive foray into ab-initio calculation of nuclear structure properties. Until recently, such calculations were limited only to nuclei with the lightest masses (A < 10). The development of renormalization group (RG) methods designed to exploit momentum scale separation in the nuclear many-body problem have made extension of ab-initio methods to the medium mass regime possible. This work focuses on the application of the fledgling in-medium similarity renormalization group (IMSRG) method to calculate excited state properties, such as energies and transition strengths, in a consistent effective operator framework. This particular variant of IMSRG employs equations-of-motion (EOM) methods to extract excited state structure from the IM-SRG effective operators.