Place: Room 513, Main Building, Beihang University

Title: Nuclear Energy Density Functionals

Speaker: Professor Dario Vretenar

He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Zagreb University, Croatia in 1988. From 1988 to 1991, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Yale University (US) and Bologna University (Italy). He was a Humboldt research fellow from 1991 to 1993 in TUM, Munich (Germany). Since 1993, he has worked in Zagreb University and became a full professor in 2001. He is a leading figure in theoretical nuclear physics in Croatia and was elected Academician of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2012. He is mainly interested in nuclear many-body physics and weak interactions and has published about 200 referee articles.

Abstract: Energy density functionals (EDF) have become a standard tool in nuclear structure calculations, providing an accurate global description of ground states and collective excitations. Guided by microscopic models for the medium dependence of nucleon self-energies in nuclear matter, semi-empirical functionals have been adjusted to the nuclear matter equation of state and to bulk properties of finite nuclei, and applied to studies of arbitrarily heavy nuclei, exotic nuclei far from stability, and even systems at the nucleon drip-lines. Some of the important challenges for nuclear EDFs include a microscopic foundation based on the underlying theory of strong interactions, accurate approximations for the exchange-correlation functional, and the extension of the EDF framework to include collective correlations.