Seminar
Computational Nuclear Structure Physics

The treatment of the atomic nucleus as quantum many-body problem presents an exciting challenge for numerical algorithms and methods in computational physics. In recent years, there have been many new developments in this area, both in terms of formulating approaches and controlled approximations for handling the quantum many-body problem, and in the numerical algorithms necessary for practically solving the defined problem.

This seminar aims to provide a hands-on overview of modern computer-based methods in nuclear structure physics, extending to the most powerful approaches in computational nuclear physics used in current research. Each seminar topic includes a “theoretical” part, which focuses on the formulation of the method within many-body quantum mechanics, and a “computational” part, where you will create your own proof-of-concept implementation of the respective method, e.g., in Python or Mathematica. Basic programming skills, such as those taught in the “Computational Physics” lecture, are sufficient for this.

Below you will find the schedule for the seminar. The topics will be distributed during the initial meeting. Since all the presentations happen in the final 5 weeks of the lecture period, there will be enough time (more than 3 month) to work on your topic and on the presentation. During this time there will be regular meeting slots to ask questions and discuss intermediate results.

IMPORTANT: You have to start working on your project right away. Yes, the presentation is still a couple of months away and it is very tempting to postpone everything until the Christmas break... well, this will likely end in disaster! Therefore, if you chose to participate in the seminar you have to be willing and able to start working on your project right away.

 

Date	Title	Speaker
17 October	Initial Meeting: Assignment of Topics
16 January	Two-Body Bound States: Basis Expansion and Convergence
23 January	Taming the Hamiltonian: Similarity Renormalization Group
30 January	Many-Nucleons in a Mean Field: Hartree-Fock Method
6 February	Sparse Large-Scale Eigenvalue Problems: Configuration Interaction Methods
13 February	Coupled Systems of Nonlinear Equations: Coupled-Cluster Theory
--	Coupled Systems of Differential Equations: In-Medium Similarity Renormalization Group