Ground-state Properties of Many-body Systems from a Renormalization-Group Approach to Density Functional Theory

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jens Braun
• Subject Area: Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
• Term: from 2015 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281808276

The theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), describes the generation of the masses of the hadrons and their dynamics at both high and low energies. In recent years, it has become possible to systematically connect nuclear structure physics to the microscopic nucleon-nucleon interactions determined by the underlying fundamental theory, namely QCD. This was not only an important achievement for nuclear structure physics but also improved tremendously our general understanding of the dynamical generation of bound many-body systems.Renormalization group (RG) techniques played a prominent role in the development of these theoretical advances. Also, the field-theoretical grounds for an RG approach to Density Functional Theory has been laid in the past few years. Such an RG approach is promising since it is expected to scale favorably to heavy nuclei and, at the same time, it allows to include microscopic interactions in a very natural way. This project aims at a first application of this novel RG method to nuclei-like systems, with an emphasis on the computation of ground-state energies, density profiles as well as density correlation functions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants