Session Q07: Celebrating the Diversity of New GFB/DNP Fellows

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My work is almost exclusively computational using high performance computers and modern partial differential equation techniques such as finite, spectral and pseudo-spectral elements, applied to Few-Body Systems (FBSs). My entire career has been spent at Florida A&M University (FAMU), an Historically Black (College/) University (HBCU). I progressed from postdoctoral fellow, to Professor of Physics (leading the establishment of a Physics PhD program at FAMU in 2001), to Vice President for Research. I have involved undergraduate and graduate students in the research throughout my career and have produced three PhD graduates and I expect a fourth PhD graduate in 2021, in the field of quantum computing. Computational FBSs are an ideal research topic for students in a small physics department where the resources are typically constrained. The use of high-performance computers and modern computational methods has infiltrated the undergraduate physics curriculum and high-quality calculations on FBSs are the ideal application test-bed for these undergraduate courses. I have recently studied various aspects of Density Functional Theory applied to High-Energy Density Science (HEDS), with the aid of the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Agency) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and have found HEDS very appropriate for PhD research.   

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Chiral effective field theory is used to perform a high-accuracy calculation of the deuteron structure radius. The strength of the short-range two-body contribution to the charge density operator at fifth chiral order is adjusted to the experimental data on the deuteron charge form factor. Using the resulting value of the structure radius together with the accurate isotope shift data relating the proton and deuteron charge radii, the charge radius of the neutron is, for the first time, extracted from light nuclei.   

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The study of rare isotopes at radioactive beam facilities has opened new frontiers in nuclear physics. To enable the discovery of model deficiencies and missing physics it is essential that the new insights from these experiments be confronted with predictive theoretical frameworks capable of describing the interplay of many-body correlations and continuum dynamics, characteristic of exotic nuclei as well as of the nuclear reactions used to produce and study them. At the same time, a predictive theory of nuclear structural and reaction properties is also desirable to aid in precisely determining thermonuclear reaction rates that play an important role in fusion-energy experiments, the predictions of stellar-evolution models, and simulations of nucleosynthetic processes. In this talk, I will review the contributions my collaborators and I made to the development of a unified microscopic understanding of the structure and low-energy reactions of light nuclei starting from validated nucleon-nucleon and three-nucleon forces and highlight some of the remaining challenges.