One of the major challenges in nuclear physics is to understand nuclear structure and reactions starting from the underlying interactions among nucleons. Over the past two decades, many efforts have been made to develop nuclear interactions based on chiral effective field theory and computationally efficient quantum many-body methods with polynomial scaling. With these systematically improvable frameworks, the range of applicability of nuclear ab initio calculations has rapidly expanded.
The neutron skin thickness of a nucleus is closely related to the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy, which is an important ingredient of the nuclear equation of state. Since neutrons are electrically neutral, determining their spatial distribution experimentally is challenging. Parity-violating electron scattering provides a powerful probe of neutron distributions, and the CREX and PREX collaborations have reported measurements of the neutron skins of 48Ca and 208Pb, respectively.
In this seminar, I will review recent progress in nuclear ab initio theory and discuss recent results on the neutron skin thicknesses of 48Ca and 208Pb.