Speaker
Description
The dynamics of quantum many-body systems underpin some of the most compelling open questions in low-energy nuclear physics. From the microscopic mechanisms driving fusion to the large-amplitude collective motion governing fission, these processes span a remarkable range of complexity. Understanding them, especially at the limits of nuclear stability, requires models that capture continuum effects, dissipation, and quantum fluctuations far from equilibrium.
Time-dependent approaches provide a natural framework for addressing this challenge, and time-dependent density functional theory in particular has proven a powerful tool for studying nuclear reactions across the chart of nuclides. Over the past decade, TDDFT-based calculations have yielded quantitative insight into fusion cross sections, quasifission timescales, and collective excitations establishing a mature foundation for real-time nuclear dynamics.
In this lecture I will briefly cover some past work in this area and highlight two frontiers where that foundation is now being extended. The first is the inclusion of many-body correlations beyond the mean field through recent developments in time-dependent coupled cluster theory as a path toward ab initio nuclear dynamics. The second is the use of machine-learning emulators to make the exploration of high-dimensional reaction dynamics computationally tractable, opening the door to systematic uncertainty quantification and large-scale reaction studies that were previously out of reach.