Interacting Bosons

So to my first talk summary, reported after the fact; hopefully most of my other talk summaries will be live, as the action happens. Possible in the style of a particularly excitable sports commentator.

All scientific errors that occur during these posts are most likely my own and not the speakers, especially considereing many will not be within my area of expertise. To the authors of the talks: please correct me if I make any outrageous mistakes or I claim that your results demonstrate the possibility of some kind of nuclear powered perpetual motion machine*,**.

This morning I was interested to hear Kosuke Nomura talk on a microscopic approach to the interacting boson model (IBM) using mean field theories. The IBM treats pairs of valence nucleons (one s-state, one d-state) as bosons. Used in shell models, it is highly successful at predicting many collective phenomena in spherical nuclei and resulting spectra.

In this work, an IBM Hamiltonian is parameterized by fitting to potential energy surfaces of deformed nuclei as calculated by mean field models such as Skyrme-Hartree-Fock. The IBM model can then be used to calculate the excitation spectra of deformed nuclei accurately. Extensions can be made to include description of collective rotational states in the IBM model. I found the potential of examining the microscopic basis of such collective phenomena using this method a particularly important and exciting area of study.

* Although this would generate much publicity for the conference.
** I am reminded of a book I once came across in a second hand book store, in which the passages of the Hebrew bible detailing the Israelites' flight from Egypt and subsequent years in the desert were 'found' to contain detailed plans for creating a 'nuclear powered manna machine'*** - this is the true mechanism by which God sent manna from heaven, apparently. Strikes me as a rather elaborate way to build a bread maker.
*** I'm not making this up.