This repository contains the most up-to-date version of my bachelor's thesis.
While I have corrected a few minor typography mistakes and typos since
submitting it, the version that was submitted can be seen by selecting the
submission_version
tag. In addition, the version of the thesis at the time of
my defense can be seen by selecting the defense_version
tag. For
convenience, abstract is offered below.
A major goal of nuclear theory is to model atomic nuclei and make theoretical
predictions of nuclear observables starting from inter-nucleon forces.
Approaches starting from these inter-nucleon forces, known as ab-initio
methods, face significant computational challenges due to the complexity
of the nuclear system and the nature of the forces. The similarity
renormalization group (SRG) method is often used in modern calculations to
soften these interactions, which simplifies the problem thereby allowing
ab-initio methods to be extended to larger systems. SRG, when applied to an
We return to the 1-dimensional system of bosons in which the nuclear theory group at OSU initially explored the application of SRG to nuclear problems. As the results from this simple system are generalizable to full 3-dimensional calculations, we seek to test alternative flow operators in this 1-dimensional system, where visualizing and interpreting results is substantially easier. We develop a Python library to handle the setup of the physical system and the SRG evolution. We compare the results obtained using this library to the results from an analogous paper by Jurgenson and Furnstahl in 2008 to verify the correctness of our implementation. We then use this framework to test induced 3-body forces for several 2-body flow operator choices. We discuss our preliminary results and offer some options for further exploration.