NSCL Directory Profile

Scott Bogner Assistant Professor Theoretical Nuclear Physics   PhD, Theoretical Physics, SUNY Stony Brook 2002 Joined NSCL in July 2007 Phone (517) 333-6433 Fax (517) 353-5967 Office 221   bogner at nsclmsuedu

My research focuses on applications of the renormalization group (RG) and effective field theories (EFT) to the microscopic description of nuclei and nuclear matter. The ultimate goal is to develop theoretical methods that generate model-independent predictions with reliable theoretical error estimates. Such capabilities will be necessary to confront fundamental problems of low-energy nuclear physics, such as the physics of nuclei far from stability, where controlled extrapolations to extreme N/Z ratios are essential but have been lacking in theoretical approaches to date. The development of such methods will be essential to provide reliable nuclear physics input for astrophysical applications and to provide meaningful theoretical support to existing and next-generation rare isotope beam facilities such as those at NSCL.

EFT and RG methods have long enjoyed a prominent role in condensed matter and high energy theory due to their power of simplification and universality. More recently, these complementary techniques have launched a paradigm shift in theoretical low-energy nuclear physics, enabling for the first time the prospect for model-independent and microscopic calculations of nuclear structure with controllable theoretical errors, within a framework that is manifestly constrained by the symmetries of the underlying quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

From a computational perspective, the use of EFT and RG techniques makes practical calculations more tractable by restricting the necessary degrees of freedom to the energy scales of interest.

A consequence is that microscopic nuclear structure calculations become much more amenable to straightforward perturbative methods, simple (i.e., less correlated) variational ansätze, and rapidly convergent basis expansions. Since a mean field description (e.g., Hartree-Fock) now becomes a reasonable starting point for nuclei and nuclear matter, the large arsenal of techniques developed for non-uniform electronic systems (e.g., density functional methods) become available for nuclei. Density functional theory (DFT) is the ideal framework to describe properties of the medium- to-heavy regions of the nuclear mass table where ab-initio methods are computationally prohibitive. Developing a microscopically-based, universal nuclear energy density functional (UNEDF) derived from RGimproved EFT Hamiltonians is a major component of the 5 year, $15M SciDAC project Building a Universal Nuclear Energy Density Functional that I am a part of, along with my MSU colleague Alex Brown. My research program presents a diverse range of research opportunities for potential Ph.D. students, encompassing three very different (but interrelated) components that offer a balance of analytical and numerical work: 1) internucleon interactions, 2) ab-initio methods for finite nuclei and infinite nuclear matter, and 3) density functional theory for nuclei.