Frontiers in Nuclear Theory
Prof. James McNeil
Department of Physics
Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401
Date: 02/28/2011
Abstract
This talk is an introduction to the scope and scale of nuclear physics phenomena and modern
approaches to understanding those phenomena. Nuclear physics lives in the neighborhood
between particle and atomic physics, although the boundaries between them are occasionally
blurred. Understanding nuclear physics is essential to understanding the fundamental abundance
of the elements, the function, evolution and ultimate fate of stars, the mechanism for super
novae, neutron stars, and much more. Nuclear technology is used in weapons, electric generation
-both on earth and in space, medicine, and as time markers in archaeology and geology. Nuclear
theory faces the dual challenges of constructing an understanding in a strongly interacting manybody context where the familiar perturbative approaches so successful in the quantum
electrodynamics case fail. This talk will review effective field theories as one of the more
promising modern approaches to nuclear theory and present a case study of using an expansion
in separable potentials that have been evolved to the low energy (nuclear) energy scale via the
method of the similarity renormalization group. Applications to 2- and 3-body nuclear scattering
will be presented.