Microscopic Optical Potentials for the Rare Isotope Era
Dr. Taylor Whitehead
Michigan State University
The study of exotic nuclei will offer direct insights into fundamental questions in physics such as the formation of heavy elements and the structure of neutron stars. As rare isotope beam facilities around the world extend their reach to increasingly exotic regions of the nuclear chart, reaction theory models with robust error estimates will be crucial to drive scientific discovery. As a key input to many reaction models, optical potentials play a central role in the analysis of a wide range of nuclear reaction experiments, yet to date the most widely applicable optical model potentials are largely phenomenological and lack uncertainty quantification. The recently constructed Whitehead-Lim-Holt (WLH) global optical potential, on the other hand, offers a microscopic description of nucleon-nucleus scattering over a large range of isotopes and scattering energies with error estimates from chiral effective field theory. In this talk, I will present several exciting applications of the WLH optical potential in nuclear reactions and preview my recent work on microscopic nucleus-nucleus optical potentials.
Hosted by Prof. Stroberg