Nuclear Physics as Precision Science

by Prof. Ulf-G. Meißner (Universität Bonn & Forschungszentrum Jülich)

Thursday 9 Jan 2020, 15:00 → 16:00 Asia/Shanghai

212 (Middle Building)

Theoretical Nuclear Physics has entered a new era. Using the powerful machinery of chiral effective Lagrangians, the forces between two, three and four nucleons can now be calculated with unprecedented precision and with reliable uncertainties. Furthermore, Monte Carlo meth-ods can be adopted to serve as a new and powerful approach to exactly solve nuclear structure and reaction problems. I discuss the foundations of these new methods and provide a variety of intriguing examples. Variations of the fundamental constants of Nature can also be investigated and the consequences for the element generation in the Big Bang and in stars are considered. This sheds new light on our anthropic view of the Universe. About the Speaker: Meißner, Ulf-G. is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Univ. Bonn. He is also Director at IKP (Nuclear Theory), FZ Jülich since 2003, and Director at IAS (Strong Interaction Theory), FZ Jülich since 2010. He received his PhD from SUNY at Stony Brook in 1984, then worked as Research Associate at CERN, MIT and Bern Univ. Prof. Meißner's work focuses on the strong interactions in their various settings, with a focus on nuclear and particle physics. Since 2012, he is the spokesperson of the Sino-German CRC "Symmetries and the Emergence of Structure in QCD". He was elected as Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009 and Member of the Academia Europaee in 2010. In 2016, he was awarded the Lise Meitner prize of the European Physical Society. Total number of refereed papers: 616 Number of citations: 42295 h index: 100