My research focuses on applications of renormalization group (RG) and effective field theory (EFT) methods to the microscopic description of nuclei and nuclear matter.
EFT and RG methods have long enjoyed a prominent role in condensed matter and high energy theory due to their power of simplification and generality. More recently, these complementary techniques have become quite widespread in low-energy nuclear physics, enabling for the first time the prospect for model-independent calculations of nuclear structure with controllable theoretical errors. From a computational perspective, the use of EFT and RG techniques substantially simplifies many-body calculations by restricting the necessary degrees of freedom to the energy scales of interest.
A consequence of using such methods to eliminate irrelevant high-momentum degrees of freedom is that nuclear many-body calculations become much more amenable to straightforward perturbative methods, simple (i.e., less correlated) variational ansätze, and rapidly convergent basis expansions. Since a mean-field description now becomes a reasonable starting point for nuclei and nuclear matter, the large arsenal of techniques developed for non-uniform electronic systems (e.g., density functional methods) become available for nuclei. Density functional theory (DFT) is the ideal framework to describe properties of the medium-to-heavy regions of the nuclear mass table where ab-initio methods are computationally prohibitive. Developing a microscopically-based, universal nuclear energy density functional (UNEDF) derived from underlying nuclear Hamiltonians is a major component of the DOE-funded Scientific Discovery thru Advanced Computing (SciDAC) project "Building a Universal Nuclear Energy Density Functional" that I am a part of, along with my colleague Alex Brown. My research program presents a diverse range of research opportunities for potential Ph.D. students, encompassing three very different (but interrelated) components that offer a balance of analytical and numerical work: 1) inter-nucleon interactions, 2) ab-initio methods for finite nuclei and infinite nuclear matter, and 3) density functional theory for nuclei.
# Education
* 2002: Ph.D., State University of New York, Stony Brook
