Physics Colloquium: Calculation of Nuclear Level Densities near the Drip Lines

Nuclear Level Densities are crucial inputs in the study of many physical processes spanning from Astrophysics to Nuclear Medicine. The knowledge of Nuclear Level Densities provides information about the internal structure of any nucleus, which determines the manner in which the nucleus participates in a physical process. This presentation describes a theoretical study of Nuclear Level Densities for nuclei that exist away from the valley of stability. As such, these nuclei are not naturally occurring and are usually very difficult to synthesize in a laboratory and theoretical efforts to study them have been limited so far.
The efforts to make these nuclei theoretically accessible involve a variety of theoretical and computational tools. Effective potentials and regular Quantum mechanical methods have been used to compute the single particle excitation energies of a neutron or a proton inside a nucleus. These single particle energy levels are then used as inputs in rigorous many-body calculations that formulate the nucleus as a gas of fermions. Since exact many-body calculations are not possible, matrix formulations or spectral distribution methods are used. The results reported in this presentation show that nuclei near the drip lines can indeed be studied using the methods described above at least for 40 < A < 100. [postinfo meta_key='enable_postinfo' meta_value='1' default='1' class='se-dbox'][postinfo meta_key='enable_venuebox' meta_value='1' default='1' id='venuebox' class='se-vbox'] [rhc_event_microdata]