Physics Theory Seminar with Lars Zurek

Nuclear ab initio calculations are commonly limited by the computational cost of handling very large tensors, especially when breaking rotational symmetry. Applying a singular value decomposition to nucleon-nucleon and three-nucleon potentials obtained from chiral effective field theory reveals that such interactions possess low-rank structure. Exploiting these low-rank properties could allow to extend the reach of ab initio approaches to heavy open-shell nuclei. However, this is a nontrivial task as it requires reformulation of the computational method used to solve the many-body Schrödinger equation. I will present our ongoing work on employing tensor factorization techniques in Bogoliubov many-body perturbation theory, which uses modern linear algebra algorithms and avoids to construct large many-body tensors in the first place.

This lecture was made possible by the William C. Ferguson fund.