Speaker
Description
Long considered a phenomenological field, breakthroughs in many-body methods together with our treatment of nuclear and electroweak forces are rapidly transforming modern nuclear theory into a true first- principles, or ab initio, discipline. In this talk I will discuss recent advances, which expand the scope of ab initio theory to global calculations of nuclei, potentially as heavy as 208Pb, including first predictions of the limits of nuclear existence into the medium-mass region.
I will then focus on recent extensions to fundamental problems in nuclear-weak physics, including a proposed solution of the long-standing gA quenching puzzle, calculations of neutrinoless double-beta decay for determining neutrino masses, and WIMP-nucleus scattering cross sections relevant for dark matter direct detection searches.
