Ab Initio Nuclear Structure and Electroweak Properties from Chiral Effective Field Theory

This thesis presents a consistent application of chiral effective field theory (EFT) interactions and currents to obtain ab initio results for light nuclei magnetic dipole and Gamow-Teller strengths in light nuclei (A≤17). Recent results have demonstrated the importance of chiral EFT corrections for correctly predicting magnetic dipole and Gamow-Teller strengths in nuclei. However, these studies have not consistently applied the same treatment to these operators as is applied to the interaction. In this work, it is found that the inclusion of chiral EFT corrections to the magnetic dipole and Gamow-Teller operators generally brings the calculated results closer to agreement with experiment. However, this work also demonstrates that the convergence of the solution to the many-body problem still poses substantial difficulties. This work has confirmed that the inclusion of chiral EFT corrections is necessary to describe light nuclei, while concluding that higher-order corrections are necessary in order to obtain good agreement with experimental data.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Nuclear Interactions and Chiral Effective Field Theory.- Chapter 3: No-Core Configuration Interaction Method.- Chapter 4: Chiral EFT Corrections to M1 Moments of Light Nuclei.- Chapter 5: Chiral EFT Corrections to Transition Matrix Elements in Light Nuclei.- Chapter 6: Conclusions and Outlook.

Patrick Fasano is a Senior HPC Applications Engineer at NextSilicon, Inc. He received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Notre Dame in 2016. He continued on to receive a master’s degree in nuclear physics in 2020, and PhD in nuclear physics in 2023. His research focuses primarily on the use of high-performance computing and advanced group-theoretic techniques to understand the properties of light nuclei from first principles.