Theoretical Uncertainty Quantification for Heavy-ion Fusion

Abstract

Despite recent advances and focus on rigorous uncertainty quantification for microscopic models of quantum many-body systems, the uncertainty on the dynamics of those systems has been under-explored. To address this, we have used time-dependent Hartree-Fock to examine the model uncertainty for a collection of low-energy, heavy-ion fusion reactions. Fusion reactions at near-barrier energies represent a rich test-bed for the dynamics of quantum many-body systems owing to the complex interplay of collective excitation, transfer, and static effects that determine the fusion probability of a given system. While the model uncertainty is sizable for many of the systems studied, the primary contribution comes from ill-constrained static properties, such as the neutron radius of neutron-rich nuclei. These large uncertainties motivate the use of information from reactions to better constrain existing models and to infer static properties from reaction data.