FRIB Theory Alliance Continues Strong Engagement as Facility Begins Operations

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FRIB Theory Alliance Continues Strong Engagement As Facility Begins Operations

By Daniel Phillips, Ohio University

The 279 members of the FRIB Theory Alliance (FRIB-TA) continue to work at the frontiers of FRIB science. FRIB-TA also keeps growing and revitalizing the field through the highly successful FRIB Theory Fellow and FRIB-TA Faculty Bridge programs.

This year marked a milestone for these programs, as Saori Pastore received promotion and tenure from the Physics Department at Washington University in St. Louis. She will also become FRIB-TA director on 1 January 2023. Pastore was one of the first faculty hired under FRIB-TA’s bridge program. The newest FRIB-TA Bridge Faculty member is Christian Drischler, who begin a position as an assistant professor at Ohio University in August. Kévin Fossez (Florida State University), Sebastian König (North Carolina State University), and Maria Piarulli (Washington University, St. Louis) round out a very strong group of scientists. The bridge program is presently seeking partner departments that wish to host a theorist.

In 2022, two more scientists joined the ranks of the FRIB Theory Fellows. Anna McCoy (Washington University, St. Louis) is exploring symmetries in nuclei to characterize their properties at a more fundamental level and Chien-Yeah Seng (University of Washington) is working on tests of CKM Unitarity in strongly-interacting systems. Together with Chloë Hebborn (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and Xilin Zhang (Michigan State University), they form a Fellow cohort that covers a broad range of topics in FRIB science. Hebborn will be leaving her FRIB Fellowship in August to take up a faculty position at MSU. The search to hire two new FRIB Theory Fellows, who will be hosted at Los Alamos National Laboratory and MSU, is approaching its conclusion.

The Theory Fellows and Bridge Faculty presented their research during this year's Low-Energy Community Meeting (LECM). LECM also saw Amy Lovell (Los Alamos) receive the FRIB Achievement Award for Earlier Career Researchers in the theory category for her development and application of methods that provide guidance for planning future experiments and insights into shortcomings of present theoretical descriptions.

FRIB-TA topical programs returned in 2022, with three held in-person. It was terrific to see scientists show up to enthusiastically discuss optical potentials, nuclear isomers, and clustering in exotic nuclei. A collaborative atmosphere was present at all three programs, and the write-ups they produced will be very valuable to our field. The next topical program will take place in May 2023 and is entitled “Theoretical Justifications and Motivations for Early High-Profile FRIB experiments.” The organizers are Alex Brown (FRIB), Alex Gade (FRIB), and Ragnar Stroberg (Argonne National Laboratory). Please contact them if you wish to participate.

This year’s FRIB-TA summer school was very popular, both because it was the first in-person one for three years, and because it focused on “Quantum Computing for Nuclear Few- and Many-Body Problems.” Held in June, it exposed participants who had no prior experience in this area to forefront quantum-computing solutions of quantum-mechanical bound-state and time-dependent problems.

The second FRIB Program Advisory Committee (PAC-2) is coming in early 2023. A survey in the fall revealed that FRIB-TA members had been involved in at least 35 proposals to PAC-1. We’re hoping for even more involvement this time around. Please consult this spreadsheet to find a list of FRIB-TA members who have explicitly signed up to motivate and interpret experiments.

In November, several FRIB-TA members participated in the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) Town Hall meeting on Nuclear Structure, Reactions, and Astrophysics at Argonne National Laboratory. Particularly notable was the participation by the FRIB-TA Bridge Faculty and Theory Fellows; they gave excellent presentations. FRIB-TA’s success since it began in 2015 was noted by many speakers, and the town hall resolutions strongly endorsed continued support for FRIB-TA. I am sure we’ll see continued vigorous engagement from the FRIB community—both theorists and experimentalists—as the Long-Range Planning process continues next year. All of us in FRIB-TA are excited to see what continued collaboration on the science of FRIB will reveal about the physics of nuclei, the processes at work in stars, and the Standard Model.

Daniel Phillips is the director of the FRIB Theory Alliance.