Orateur
Description
The objective of the ab initio approach to nuclear structure is to provide a systematically improvable description
of nuclear systems. Inter-nucleon interactions among the constituent protons and neutrons are consistently derived
within the framework of chiral effective field theory (EFT). The solution of the many-body Schr¨odinger equation is
based on a systematic expansion of the target eigenstate supplemented by controlled approximations.
While early ab initio calculations were limited to few-nucleon systems due to the exponential cost of quasi-exact
methods used to solve the many-body Schr¨odinger equation, nowadays calculations of medium-mass closed-shell nuclei
are routinely performed thanks to the availability of refined many-body expansion methods scaling polynomially
with the system’s size. Still, their extension to heavy and/or open-shell nuclei remains a formidable formal and
computational challenge. In this context, a novel many-body approach coined Bogoliubov coupled-cluster (BCC)
theory extends the reach of ab initio prediction to medium-heavy semi-magic isotopes.
This presentation will exhibit the recent application of BCC to binding energy and charge radius predictions along
the tin isotopic chain. The predicted neutron drip-line location is found to be highly sensitive to the employed nuclear
interactions and to exhibit tension with recent energy-density-functional predictions. In addition to the reproduction
of absolute radii, the parabolic behaviour of isotopic shifts between the N = 50 and N = 82 magic numbers and the
kink through 132Sn are shown to provide stringent tests for chiral EFT interactions.
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