The Physics & Astronomy Colloquium Series presents Chloë Hebborn of IJCLab(Laboratoire De Physique Des 2 Infinite Irène Joliot-Curie), discussing "Enhancing Reaction Predictions in the Rare-isotopes Beams Era" on December 5.

Abstract: Predicting nuclear reactions of nuclei accurately over the whole nuclear chart is essential to refine our comprehension of nucleosynthesis and to interpret experimental studies of nuclear structure.

Experimentally, facilities such as the DOE Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) in the US are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge by providing unprecedented access to exotic systems with an extreme ratio of protons and neutrons. Theoretically, first-principles theories, which treat all nucleons as active particles, provide an accurate evaluation of rates for reactions involving light nuclei. For higher energy and heavier nuclei, these methods become computationally intractable, and the problem is usually simplified in a few-body model, composed of clusters of nucleons. The accuracy of these few-body predictions now relies on the quality of the approximations used to solve the few-body dynamics and the quality of the effective interactions between the clusters.

In this colloquium, I will highlight selected recent works focusing on the evaluation of reaction rates for astrophysics, improvements of few-body methods and their interactions, and developments in quantifying uncertainties in reaction observables.