Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

The nuclear energy density functional (NEDF) is the tool of choice to investigate the properties of medium-heavy mass nuclei from drip-line to drip-line and beyond. Among the different microscopic approaches to solve the nuclear many-body problem, probably no other method achieves comparable global accuracy at the same computational cost as the nuclear energy density functional. Among others, the Skyrme functional is the most used; due to its zero-range nature, it can be easily implemented into a numerical code with very low computational cost. Moreover it has been sucessfully applied in astrophysical calculation to determine some important properties of neutron stars.
The Nuclear Physics group at York has recently expanded into Nuclear Theory research and offers several projects for possible Ph.D. candidates related to the NEDF. In particular the current activity of the group is mainly focused on:

1. Development of new functionals: recent analyses indicate that the currently used NEDFs have probably reached their limits of accuracy. The question of whether these can be systematically improved appears to be the central issue of the present-day investigations in this domain of nuclear-structure physics. The main lines of current attempts are in expansions based on higher-order derivative corrections and/or including three- or four-body terms. Novel EDFs are often based on zero- range or finite-range pseudopotentials and may have local, quasilocal, or nonlocal character. Some of the new developments have already led to implementations in numerical codes and preliminary applications to finite nuclei are gradually becoming available.

2. Nuclear data: NEDF approaches have reached a very advanced state of development and allow for describing large classes of nuclear phenomena and observables. It is thus possible to perform systematic calculations of several nuclear observables as giant resonances or binding energies along the entire nuclear chart. These data are important since they form the necessary input database to describe other physical process as for example the r-process nucleosynthesis or nuclear fission.

3. Nuclear astrophysics: NEDF is the tool of choice to describe several astrophysical phenomena as stellar burning or the physics of neutron stars (NS). A NS is a type of compact star that can result from the gravitational collapse of a massive star after a supernova and is the densest and smallest star known to exist in the Universe. In particular, NEDF is used to determine the relation between density and pressure (Equation of State) at finite temperature. The Equation of State is then used in numerical simulations to study the thermal and time evolution of the NS.