Lectio Magistralis
Stefano Gandolfi
Staff member of the theoretical division @ LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
(2004-2007: PhD in Trento)
Properties and similarities of Fermions in nuclear physics, cold atoms
and neutron stars
Quantum Monte Carlo methods provide an important tool to predict properties of strongly correlated systems that cannot be studied using perturbation theory. The equation of state of nuclear matter at nuclear densities is the bridge between the terrestrial experiments aiming to measure the symmetry energy and the structure of neutron stars. An even more important challenge is the study of properties of inhomogeneous neutron matter at moderate densities that is not reliable in experiments but is essential to constrain the nuclear density functionals commonly used in the physics of heavy nuclei and to study the crust of neutron stars.
On the other side, low-density neutron matter exhibits important similarities to properties of strongly interacting Fermi gases that offer the feature to be very manageable in experiments. The unitary Fermi gas is become the best tool to test the accuracy of many-body techniques that are employed in nuclear physics.
In this talk I will present the recent progresses that has been made in these different fields in the last web years.