Title:	Ab initio computations of deformed nuclear structure
DNr:	NAISS 2026/3-333
Project Type:	NAISS Medium
Principal Investigator:	Christian Forssén <christian.forssen@chalmers.se>
Affiliation:	Chalmers tekniska högskola
Duration:	2026-05-01 – 2027-05-01
Classification:	10301
Keywords:

Abstract

Through the research program contained in this proposal we want to address theoretical nuclear physics aspects that relate to two research campaigns of high scientific profile: 1. The search for electric dipole moments (EDM) in nuclei/atoms/molecules. 2. Sensitivity of nuclear structure to effective field theory interactions. The first program aims at searching for elusive charge-parity (CP) violation in the strong sector, and the second can improve our understanding of nuclear forces and their connection to the more fundamental theory of Quantum Chromodynamics. The achievement of these ambitious goals relies on progress at the frontier of modern ab initio nuclear theory. Through this proposal we want to establish a completely new research program in state-of-the-art many-body modeling within the nuclear theory group at Chalmers. Employing recently developed computational frameworks we will pursue (deformed) mean-field and beyond mean-field calculations of medium- and heavy-mass nuclear systems. In particular, searches for EDMs will require repeated calculations of heavy nuclei under different deformation constraints, an intrinsically expensive task even when employing the computationally efficient method we plan to use. Regarding the sensitivity studies, we plan to expand this point into two subtopics: i. predicting the neutron dripline in the light-to-medium mass region, which has been experimentally established only up to the neon isotopes; ii. investigating the evolution of shell closures in the heavy-mass region, exploiting the deformed framework already available in our code. Both the dripline and shell-closure predictions are fundamental to understanding nuclear structure, and both require generating large sets of training data to be fed into a Parametric Matrix Model emulator that has already been implemented. --- The computations involve three connected tasks (see Resource usage for details): --- 1. The generation of nuclear interaction matrix elements from chiral effective field theory. 2. Production runs with state-of-the-art many-body solvers for quantum systems of strongly-interacting particles. 3. Running fast and accurate emulators for many-body solvers. --- This research project is connected to the following research grant: --- (i) VR project grant: "Nuclear physics searches for strong CP violation" (C. Forssen, PI, and Alberto Scalesi, co-PI)