Marcus theory has explained how thermal nuclear motions modulate the energy gap between donor and acceptor sites in protein electron transfer reactions. Thermal motions, however, may also modulate electron tunneling between these reactions. Here we identify a new mechanism of nuclear dynamics amplification that plays a central role when interference among the dominant tunneling pathway tubes is...

– Based on our experimental studies of the electron screening effect in the H(d, p)H reaction for five deuteron-implanted solid targets (C,Al,Zr,Pd,Ta), theoretical calculations have been performed within an improved dielectric function theory. The theory describes correctly the observed target material dependence of the screening energies, underestimating, however, the absolute values by about...

Low-energy nuclear theory has entered an era of ab initio nuclear structure and reaction calculations based on QCD. One of the most promising paths from QCD to nuclear observables employs Hamiltonians constructed within chiral effective field theory as starting point for precise ab initio studies. However, the full inclusion of chiral twoplus three-nucleon (NN+3N) interactions in exact and appr...

Ab-initio predictions of nuclei with masses up to A⇠100 or more are becoming possible thanks to novel advances in computations and in the formalism of many-body physics. Some of the most fundamental issues include how to deal with many-nucleon interactions, how to calculate degenerate—open shell—systems, and pursuing ab-initio approaches to reaction theory. Self-consistent Green’s function (SCG...

In nuclear reactor design, the most fundamental task is to follow the neutron distribution as a function of space, direction, energy and time, in order to maintain and control the nuclear fission chain reaction. The fundamental equation governing the average behaviour of neutrons is given by the linear form of Boltzmann transport equation, which is an integro-differential equation. The core sim...

An analogy is uncovered between the nuclear reaction rate in a dense neutral plasma and the energy equipartition rate in a strongly magnetized non-neutral plasma. In strong magnetic fields, cyclotron energy, like nuclear energy, is released only through rare close collisions between charges. The probability of such collisions is enhanced by plasma screening effects, just as in nuclear reactions...

How does nature hold together protons and neutrons to form the wide variety of complex nuclei in the Universe? Describing many-nucleon systems from the fundamental theory of quantum chromodynamics has been the greatest challenge in answering this question. The chiral effective field theory description of the nuclear force now makes this possible but requires certain parameters that are not uniq...