Research Interests

My research interests are centered around theoretical low-energy nuclear structure physics described in the framework of self-consistent mean-field models.

The topics of my research are related to three challenging problems which appear in all disciplines of physics dealing with finite many-particle (mesoscopic) systems, namely how their complexity emerges from their simpler building blocks; how, complementary, patterns, regularities, and symmetries arise in complex systems; and finally how the interaction between composite objects can be derived from the properties of and the interactions between their building blocks.

Among the known finite quantum mechanical systems, atomic nuclei exhibit the richest variety of phenomena. Some of them are linked to individual nucleons, others to the collective behavior of the nucleus as a whole, or correlations among a small number of nucleons.

The extrapolation of any nuclear property based on smooth trends with proton and neutron numbers, angular momentum and excitation energy does rarely work on a quantitative level. The strong interaction in the nucleus cannot be treated in a perturbative way, and nuclei are too small for statistical methods to be valid, which makes the nuclear many-body problem a challenging one.

My research has three major directions:

• the development, design, implementation and optimization of new numerical tools for an improved and consistent theoretical description of a variety of low-energy nuclear phenomena by systematically adding long-range correlations to mean-field approaches
• the construction and parametrization of universal effective interactions for such calculations
• the application of these models to analyze available data and to make predictions for future experiments.

MB, 30 October 2021.