October 2026: Members of the few-body group won the second place at the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science (ARNPS) Video Contest. They created a 5 min video explaining optical poentials, accessible to non experts.
Congrats Grigor, Daniel, Kyle, Andy, Patrick and Manuel !! (and Pablo for the technical support)
October 2026: the first paper of Cate was just published in Phys. Rev. C! Her work presents a re-analysis of inelastic scattering data of 15C of deuteron,recently measured at ANL.
September 2026: Patrick just published in Phys. Lett. B his recent uncertainty-quantified predictions for 22C.
April 2026: Qinyi, a highschool student working with Kyle, presented her work on uncertainty quantification at the Okemos High School's Science Research Symposium!
April 2026: the work of Manuel "Wavefunction-based emulation of coupled-channels scattering with nonaffinely parametrized interactions" is an editor suggestion in Phys. Rev. C.
April 2026: Daniel just graduated, congrats Daniel!
March 2026: Andy is the recipient of the fellowship is the Alfred J. and Ruth Zeits Endowed Fellowship, congrats Andy!
Dec. 2025: Manuel and collaborators just submitted his work on the development a physics-based emulator for coupled-channel scattering. He demonstrated the accuracy of his emulator for elastic and inelastic scattering of neutron on 48Ca and 208Pb. His work points out the advantages of the emulator, and how it is expected to scale with the number of channels. Congrats Manuel!
Nov. 2025: Kyle, Filomena & Sam participated to the "ISNET-11 : Information and Statistics in Nuclear Experiment and theory" at ECT*. They will all three present their recent works!
Nov. 2025: the first paper of Daniel was just published in Phys. Rev. C!
Nov. 2025: Andy, Patrick and Chloë participated to the workshop 'Low-energy nuclear theory: from few nucleons to stars' at IJClab. Andy & Patrick have presented their recent work.
Oct. 2025: Andy, Patrick and Chloë participated to the pan-american few-body physics boot camp at the ECT*. Andy & Patrick have presented their recent work.
Oct. 2025: DNP 2025: Cate presented her on inelastic scattering scattering of one-neutron halo nucleus!
September 2025: Cate receives support for the Galonsky International Travel Award, which supports overseas scientific experiences. With this award, she will visit University of Sevilla in Spain to collaborate with Gregory Potel on her thesis project.
June 2025: Andy is the recipient of the Chateaubriand fellowship! This fellowship is awarded to oustanding PhD student from US institutions who wish to conduct part of their PhD in France. Andy will be visiting IJClab for 9 months in 2025-2026. Congrats Andy!
March 2025: Manuel is the recipient of the fellowship is the Alfred J. and Ruth Zeits Endowed Fellowship, congrats Manuel!
March 2025: Andy receives support from the James L. and Alice M. Snelgrove Endowed Doctoral Studies Enrichment Fund in physics to visit IJClab and collaborate with Chloë for 2 months in May-June-July 2025.
Nov. 2024: Daniel was chosen to receive the Department of Physics and Astronomy's Lawrence W. Hantel Endowed Fellowship awards for his research work. His work focuses on analysing how uncertainties associated with optical potentials propagate to different reaction cross sections on various nuclei. The Hantel endowed fellowship provides talented undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in long-term research programs that will augment their preparation for graduate school and the work environment. Congrats Daniel!
Oct. 2024: DNP 2024: Andy, Manuel, Kyle and Patrick have presented their recent work spanning charge-exchange reactions, optical potentials calibration, coupled-channel emulators and the shape of fission modes!
Sep. 2024: the first paper of Andy was just published in Phys. Rev. C!
August 2024: Together with Linda Hlophe (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Grigor organized a FRIB Theory Alliance summer school “Put the reaction into action: A Nuclear physics boot camp on reaction methods”. In this summer school, variety of theoretical approaches for computing nuclear reaction observables were discussed and most utilized reaction methods were introduced. There were all wonderful lectures and discussions, both lecturers and students really liked the school !
More information and useful material is available at https://indico.frib.msu.edu/event/75/.
July 2024: Manuel is the recipient of the fellowship is the Alfred J. and Ruth Zeits Endowed Fellowship, congrats Manuel!
June 2024: Chloë is the recipient of the 2024 FRIB Achievement Award for Early Career Researchers for her innovative work describing nuclear reactions on exotic nuclei.
June 2024: Chloë, Melina Avila (Argonne National Laboratory), Kostas Kravvaris, Gregory Potel and Sofia Quaglioni (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) just published their last study on α-induced reactions of astrophysical interest in Phys. Rev. C Letter. In this study, they discuss how a first-principle calculation of 6Li impact the evaluations of α-induced reactions, 13C(α,n)16O and 12C(α,γ)16O, for which the low-energy cross sections have been constrained with (6Li,d) transfer data. Their calculation further resolves the discrepancy between recent underground measurements of the 13C(α,n)16O reaction and leads to a 21% reduction of the 12C(α,γ)16O cross sections with respect to a previous estimation.
Mar. 2024: Andy just submitted his first paper on arXiv, in collaboration with Chloë, Filomena and Remco Zegers. His work focus on uncertainty quantification in (p,n) charge-exchange-exchange reactions populating isobaric analog statesat beam energies in the range of 25-160 MeV. He showed that the total parametric uncertainties on the cross sections are around 60-100% and that the source of this uncertainty is mainly the transition operator (the uncertainties from the distorted waves alone are less than about 15%). He also performed between two- and three-body models that both describe the dynamics of the reaction within the DWBA and demonstrated that the predictions from these two models are similar and generally agree with the available data. This suggests 1-step DWBA is sufficient to describe the reaction process. This work provides motivation for the quantification of uncertainties associated with the transition operator in three-body model. It also suggests that further constraint of the optical potential parameters is needed for increased model precision.
Nov. 2023: Recent work led by Chloë, in collaboration with Filomena and Amy Lovell (LANL), has recently been published in Physical Review Letters. This work presents the first consistent analysis of one-nucleon transfer and one-nucleon knockout data, in which theoretical uncertainties associated with the nucleon- nucleus effective interactions considered in the reaction models are quantified using a Bayesian analysis. Our results demonstrate that, taking into account these uncertainties, the spectroscopic strengths of loosely bound nucleons extracted from both transfer and knockout probes agree with each other and, although there are still discrepancies for deeply bound nucleons, the slope of the asymmetry dependence of the single-particle strengths inferred from transfer and knockout reactions are consistent within 2σ. The uncertainties obtained in this work represent a lower bound and are already significantly larger than the original estimates.
Sep. 2023: Andy gave his first talk at the Midwest Theory Get Together 2023 at Argonne National Laboratory! He presented his latest results on uncertainties in charge exchange reactions.