Ab initio calculations of reactions of light nuclei

¹ CEA, DAM, DIF, 91297 Arpajon, France
² Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, PO Box 808, L-414, Livermore, California 94551, USA
³ TRIUMF, 4004 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 2A3, Canada

^a e-mail: guillaume.hupin@cea.fr

Published online: 13 September 2017

Abstract

An ab initio (i.e., from first principles) theoretical framework capable of providing a unified description of the structure and low-energy reaction properties of light nuclei is desirable as a support tool for accurate evaluations of crucial reaction data for nuclear astrophysics, fusion-energy research, and other applications. We present an efficient many-body approach to nuclear bound and scattering states alike, known as the ab initio no-core shell model with continuum. In this approach, square-integrable energy eigenstates of the A-nucleon system are coupled to (A-A)+A target-plus-projectile wave functions in the spirit of the resonating group method to obtain an efficient description of the many-body nuclear dynamics both at short and medium distances and at long ranges. We show that predictive results for nucleon and deuterium scattering on ⁴He nuclei can be obtained from the direct solution of the Schröedinger equation with modern nuclear potentials.