Interacting many-body systems, from meV to GeV

The dynamics and thermodynamics of quarks and gluons inside hadrons, protons and neutrons inside nuclei, electrons in metals and atoms in macromolecules share several important common features, despite the huge gap in the energy scales involved, which ranges from meV to GeV. In particular all these systems present phenomena, like collectivity, clusterization, phase transitions etc., that cannot be described effectively in terms of non-interacting degrees of freedom. In studying these systems we face two natural frontiers. The first one aims at giving a microscopic interpretation of these typical many-body phenomena by an exact treatment of the dynamics. The other is devoted to the search of the explicit form of the interaction between the constituents.

In order to solve our problems quantitatively, and to be able to compare with experimental data, we apply theoretical and computational techniques that have been developed in the context of nuclear and subnuclear physics. It is these techniques that allow us to study such a large class of physical systems, spanning from nuclear and subnuclear systems to proteins.

The group combines expertise in few- and many-body physics, quantum and statistical field theory and computational physics. The physical systems are investigated using both ab-initio methods and approximate techniques. The former include molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo simulations and expansions in hyper-spherical harmonics when dealing with bound state properties, and the Lorentz integral transform method, when dealing with scattering problems. The latter include density functional theory, perturbation theory and mean field theory.