Collaborative Research: Advancing first-principle symmetry-guided nuclear modeling for studies of nucleosynthesis and fundamental symmetries in nature

Jerry Draayer, Louisiana State University

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Jerry Draayer, Tomas Dytrych, Kristina Launey, Daniel Langr, Tomas Oberhuber, Robert Baker, Grigor Sargsyan, Pavel Novy, Frantisek Knapp, Jakub Herko, Martin Kocicka, Alexis Mercenne

Understanding the origin, structure, and phases of hadronic matter is key to comprehending the evolution of the universe. To fully achieve this, we need to model the complex dynamics of atomic nuclei. The scale of computational challenges that are inherent to modeling such intricate quantum many-body systems makes the utilization of petascale level resources, like Blue Waters, essential. The objective of this project is to use the Blue Waters system to advance large-scale modeling of light through intermediate-mass nuclei and, for the first time, medium-mass nuclei, including short-lived isotopes not yet accessible to experiment but key to breakthrough solutions to open questions in basic and applied research, as well as the focus of next-generation radioactive beam facilities.

Specifically, the project will use an innovative approach, the symmetry-adapted no-core shell model (SA-NCSM), which employs exact as well as approximate symmetries of nuclei to solve the nonrelativistic Schrodinger equation for a system of particles interacting via realistic nuclear forces. The proposed calculations will provide nuclear wave functions of unprecedented accuracy that are crucial for gaining further knowledge of fundamental symmetries in nature, as well as on extracting information from large datasets that is essential for neutrino physics, for probing physics beyond the standard model, and modeling of astrophysical processes.

In addition, the project will train and educate graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in nuclear structure modeling using large-scale computational resources to address important problems in physics and related fields. The students will acquire and further their skills in the development of high performance computational physics software, laying the foundations for their careers in science and technology. Moreover, the project will provide open access to software and data, including nuclear structure information of unprecedented accuracy and scope—only possible when coupled with the Blue Waters computational capabilities—as a publicly available database.