Abstract
ABSTRACT The goal of nuclear structure physics is to provide a complete understanding of the static properties of atomic nuclei, their excitation spectra, their response to external fields and their decays. While it is hard to achieve these goals within a single framework, so that there is no nuclear ‘standard model’, it is clear that nuclear Density Functional Theory (DFT) has probably the widest range of applicability so far. In this paper, we try to put DFT in a broader context, with frequent comparisons to electronic DFT. We also include a discussion of the relationships with ab initio methods and Effective Field Theories (EFTs) in general, as well as a short survey of the quite large number of applications. Although written with a personal and possibly biased perspective, the paper aims at fostering cross-fertilizations with other domains of science.
Highlights
Nuclear physics has the well-deserved reputation of being an intricate, demanding, and sometimes painful subject in physics.At the phenomenological level, one can start by considering the huge variety of properties that nuclear systems display
Other combinations can be bound and yet decay into other forms on a very long or very short timescale; very short-lived nuclei are hard to detect experimentally but we are experiencing a continuous progress in this respect, as testified by the fact that 3302 stable and unstable nuclei have been reported to exist at the end of 2018 [1], and that 13 nuclei/year have been discovered on average in the years 2103–2016 and 34 in 2017 [2]
It is unclear which is the upper limit in density for a purely nuclear Energy Density Functionals (EDFs), and how to match with a successful model that includes other particles that are created above a given threshold
Summary
Nuclear physics has the well-deserved reputation of being an intricate, demanding, and sometimes painful subject in physics. Chiral NN potentials can at present be tested against the nuclear phenomenology by using many-body methods that, albeit approximate, have control on the nature and the quantitative impact of the approximations, and can in principle be improved up to exact results, as we mentioned at the start of this Section These methods include Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) approaches [36,37], the In-Medium Similarity Renormalization Group (IMSRG) method [38], the Coupled Cluster (CC) approach [39], the SelfConsistent Green’s Function Theory (SCGFT) [40], nonrelativistic and covariant Brueckner-Hartree-Fock (BHF) theory [41], and the No-Core Shell Model [42]. The fit has something in common with that of nuclear Energy Density Functionals (EDFs), that we will discuss
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