Ab Initio No Core Shell Model - Recent Results and Further Prospects

Abstract

There has been significant recent progress in solving the long-standing problems of how nuclear shell structure and collective motion emerge from underlying microscopic inter-nucleon interactions. We review a selection of recent significant results within the ab initio No Core Shell Model (NCSM) closely tied to three major factors enabling this progress: (1) improved nuclear interactions that accurately describe the experimental two-nucleon and three-nucleon interaction data; (2) advances in algorithms to simulate the quantum many-body problem with strong interactions; and (3) continued rapid development of high-performance computers now capable of performing $20\times 10^{15}$ floating point operations per second. We also comment on prospects for further developments.

Comments: Invited paper presented at NTSE-2014 and published online in the proceedings (see footnote on p.1)