Seminar Details

Three nucleon forces and the structure of exotic nuclei

Jason Holt, University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Tuesday, February 7, 11:00 AM - Theory Seminar
NSCL Seminar Room

With the advent of the next generation of radioactive beam facilities worldwide, one of the central challenges for nuclear theory will be to develop new or expand existing microscopic models to understand and predict the novel properties of nuclei far from stability. At the heart of this theoretical effort will be three-nucleon forces, whose impact in medium mass nuclei represents one of the frontiers of nuclear structure theory. I will discuss recent advances based on effective field theory and renormalization group methods, in which medium mass, exotic nuclei are studied in a fully microscopic framework systematically constructed from two- and three nucleon forces. We have used this approach to explore oxygen and calcium isotope chains, where 3N forces were essential in explaining why 24O is the heaviest oxygen isotope and in understanding the N=28 magic number in calcium. We then extend this work to investigate excited states in neutron-rich oxygen and calcium isotopes and predict the evolution of shell structure in calcium, most importantly the N=34 magic number, to the limits of existence. Finally I will highlight a recent collaboration with the TITAN experiment at TRIUMF, in which this work played a key role in understanding a new measurement of the mass of 52Ca.