Ab initio limits of atomic nuclei

Understand

We predict the limits of existence of atomic nuclei, the proton and neutron drip lines, from the light through medium-mass regions.

• Starting from a chiral two- and three-nucleon interaction with good saturation properties, we use the valence-space in-medium similarity renormalization group to calculate ground-state and separation energies from helium to iron, nearly 700 isotopes in total.
• We use the available experimental data to quantify the theoretical uncertainties for our ab initio calculations towards the drip lines.
• Where the drip lines are known experimentally, our predictions are consistent within the estimated uncertainty.