Ab-initio Hamiltonian approach to light nuclei

and to quantum field theory

J P VARY^1,*, H HONKANEN¹, JUN LI¹, P MARIS¹, A M SHIROKOV²,

S J BRODSKY³, A HARINDRANATH⁴, G F DE TERAMOND⁵,

E G NG⁶, C YANG⁶ and M SOSONKINA⁷

¹Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA

²Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, Moscow State University, Moscow 119992, Russia

³SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94309, USA

⁴Theory Group, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, 1/AF, Bidhan Nagar, Kolkata 700 064, India

⁵Universidad de Costa Rica, San Jos\'e, Costa Rica

⁶Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

⁷Ames Laboratory, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA

^*Corresponding author. E-mail: jvary@iastate.edu}

Abstract. Nuclear structure physics is on the threshold of

confronting several longstanding problems such as the origin of

shell structure from basic nucleon--nucleon and three-nucleon

interactions. At the same time those interactions are being

developed with increasing contact to QCD, the underlying theory of

the strong interactions, using effective field theory. The

motivation is clear -- QCD offers the promise of great predictive

power spanning phenomena on multiple scales from quarks and gluons

to nuclear structure. However, new tools that involve

non-perturbative methods are required to build bridges from one

scale to the next. We present an overview of recent theoretical and

computational progress with a Hamiltonian approach to build these

bridges and provide illustrative results for the nuclear structure of

light nuclei and quantum field theory.

Keywords. Microscopic nuclear structure; no core shell model;

light-front field theory.

PACS Nos 21.10.-k; 21.60.De; 11.15.Tk; 12.20.-m; 12.38.-t