Graduate Student Seminar with Jason Bub on Effective Field Theory Model Creation

While nuclear physics has been studied for over 100 years, there is still a struggle to understand the interactions that give rise to the physical phenomena that we observe, despite the rapid characterization of the underlying fundamental forces in the same timeframe. However, in the last few decades, effective field theory (EFT) has become a powerful tool for theoretical nuclear physicists as a means to examine and explain nuclear interactions by extending fundamental field theories to nuclear interactions. Yet, there is still an underlying problem that plagues theoretical nuclear calculations: uncertainty quantification. Even with our advancement in theoretical calculations, they remain unsatisfactory without a means to compare them to observed quantities responsibly. To remedy this shortcoming, we introduce Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) as one part of a multifaceted approach to introduce uncertainty in EFT models, along with the introduction of a novel computational approach to reduce the time needed for the calculations involved.