Opening the Ab Initio Floodgates

Abstract:  The past decade has witnessed a staggering expansion in the range of applicability of ab initio many-body methods, enabling the use of the same nuclear interaction to describe few-body and medium-mass systems. I will report on recent developments in using the in medium similarity renormalization group (IM-SRG) to derive effective valence space interactions and operators. This approach incorporates the experience gained from large scale shell model investigations of nuclear structure, while eliminating the need for phenomenological adjustments and thus enhancing predictive power where no data exist. I will present selected results for isotopes ranging from lithium to cadmium, and discuss prospects for providing reliable many-body uncertainties.