The SDSU physics department welcomes back Micah Schuster from his 3rd internship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Micah is a Ph.D. student in computational science working with Calvin Johnson in the field of nuclear physics. He was brought to the lab through the Institute for Scientific Computing Research to work with Sofia Quaglioni in the computational nuclear physics group.
Like the previous 2 years, Micah won first place at the annual the LLNL student poster symposium on his poster titled: “Operator evolution for ab initio nuclear theory” See below for his abstract of his poster.
Abstract:
The past two decades have seen a revolution in ab initio calculations of nuclear properties. One key element has been the development of a rigorous effective interaction theory, applying unitary transformations to soften the nuclear Hamiltonian and hence accelerate the convergence as a function of the model space size. For consistency, however, one ought to apply the same transformation to other operators when calculating properties other than spectra. In this work we use the similarity renormalization group (SRG) to soften the Hamiltonian and, for the first time, compute the matter radius of 3H, 4He, and 6Li.