Building Nuclei from Scratch: Advances in Ab Initio Nuclear Structure Theory

by Robert Roth

Tuesday Jul 21, 2026, 4:00 PM → 6:00 PM Europe/Berlin

H5 (UHG)

Atomic nuclei are among the most complicated quantum many-body systems, driven by nontrivial two- and three-nucleon interactions and governed by highly correlated many-nucleon states.

The theoretical description of nuclei from the ground up, i.e. ab initio, is a huge formal and computational challenge. Still, there has been great progress over the past decades — starting from new generations of nuclear interactions rooted in QCD, to innovative quantum many-body methods, computational techniques, and machine-learning tools for the post-processing of observables. All steps include a systematic evaluation of theory uncertainties, so that observables can be predicted with statistically meaningful theory error bars. We will go on a guided tour for non-experts, building nuclear structure theory step by step and highlighting some of the key innovations. We will focus on methodological aspects that might prove useful for applications to other quantum many-body systems as well.

2026-07-21-RobertRoth.pdf