The iconic $^{238}$U: ab initio nuclear structure theory towards the limit of the periodic table

Abstract

The ab initio description of heavy and superheavy nuclei constitutes one of the holy grails of nuclear theory, bearing on the synthesis of the heaviest elements and the limits of nuclear stability. Over the last fifteen years, many-body expansion methods, whose numerical cost scales polynomially with system size, have extended first-principles calculations to medium-mass nuclei and a few spherical closed-shell heavy systems. The largest portion of the nuclear chart is however composed of heavy deformed doubly open-shell nuclei and has remained completely out of reach. This is due to two major obstacles: (i) the huge computational cost of beyond mean-field calculations in very large single-particle bases, and (ii) a dubious collapse of the mean-field energy at large prolate deformation. While a highly efficient numerical implementation of the novel deformed self-consistent Green's function formalism removes the first difficulty, the second is cured by the inclusion of many-body correlations beyond the deformed mean field. Presenting the first ab initio calculation of the iconic $^{238}$U nucleus, this work brings the upper-end of the nuclear chart within reach of theoretical predictions based on first principles.