Atomic nuclei constitute 99.9% of all baryonic matter in the universe, the matter that comprises stars, planets, and everything in our everyday existence. Along with the pursuit of understanding the fundamental science, current nuclear studies have broader applications within future energy and defense research and can significantly contribute to progress in medicine.

The constituent particles, protons and neutrons, interact through complex nuclear forces that lead to a wide range of nuclear phenomena. Ideally, scientists would like to experimentally investigate the nuclei in question, but many, particularly those with short lifetimes, are difficult to produce within a laboratory environment. Approximately 2,000 nuclei have been measured, but there still remain a large number, over 4,000 nuclei, that have not been experimentally studied. Developing a comprehensive theoretical description of nuclei and their reactions is necessary, to not only explain experimental results, but to predict nuclear behavior.

Over the past decade, there has been a fundamental shift in theoretical nuclear physics investigations from the phenomenological methods to a more basic approach to understanding nuclei. This has been enabled through advancements in theory and availability of computing resources that allow for the more reliable, but computationally intensive first principles methods to be tractable.

There are two approaches emerging into the foreground to address the full spectrum of nuclei: Ab initio methods, for light nuclei, use the basic interactions between protons and neutrons and solves the quantum many-body problem, the other is nuclear density functional theory that describes a broader range of nuclei using a self-consistent mean-field method with one-body densities and currents.

To achieve frontier nuclear structure calculations, nuclear theories must be realized in a high performance computing environment. My research interests involve scaling and developing these theories for a Leadership Class environment, which is necessary for describing complex nuclear interactions. Using these tools, I would like to continue investigations in nuclear structure and the pursuit of a consistent microscopic theory for atomic nuclei.

If you would like to read more about nuclear physics at SDSU, I recommend reading more at Dr. Calvin W. Johnson's website (my advisor) in the Physics Department at SDSU.