Nuclear physics in the coming decade

Abstract

Abstract. The summary talk for this conference is actually a brief status report on the physics of nuclei and what advances we may anticipate during the next decade. We are making progress on multiple fronts to tackle the nuclear quantum many-body problem. Due to the continuing expansion and use of computational science in our field, and due to the new experimental facilities that will soon be available, progress will continue. IntroductionIn summarizing this conference in honor of Jerry Draayer's 70 th birthday, I tried to perform an extrapolation of the next 10 years (when we celebrate HITES2022) of the physics of nuclei based on where we are today. This kind of discussion is, of course, difficult, as we all know that extrapolation is far more uncertain than interpolation. We heard many excellent presentations at this conference, and one surmises from them that the field is making substantial progress in developing a theoretical understanding of nuclei. I will attempt to briefly indicate some of the progress that is being made and some of the developments that will occur during the next few years.One goal of our field is to understand nuclei. To that end we develop a comprehensive theory of nuclei; we experimentally determine rare isotope properties and use these as benchmarks to validate our theories and approximations; and we use this validated theory to make predictions where experimental data are not available (e.g., for nucleosynthesis). We have witnessed in the last decade an increasingly sophisticated approach to the nuclear many-body problem. During the next decade, the field will continue to develop effective field theory approaches, computationally scalable many-body techniques, and increasingly accurate energy density functionals for nuclear density functional theory approaches.During the next decade we should see the completion of second-generation rare isotope experimental facilities such as GSI/FAIR, SPIRAL-II, and HIE-ISOLDE in Europe, FRIB in the US, and an upgraded TRIUMF in Canada, and the continuation of the experimental program at RIBF in Japan and other facilities. Experiments will probe many aspects of neutron-rich nuclei. Furthermore, they should enable a substantial experimental description of nuclear properties along the r-process -the process that creates half of the heavy elements from iron to uranium and is believed to occur during supernova explosions or neutron star mergers.In developing a comprehensive theory for nuclei, we have increasingly relied on highperformance computing. With calculations performed on these machines, we should be able to constrain theoretical parameters and we should be able to quantify uncertainties of the calculations. Uncertainty quantification, admittedly a buzz word today, is a way of performing numerical analysis to determine the accuracy of a given calculation.