I will report on efforts under way to find a density functional theory of nuclei that would achieve for nuclear physics what has been accomplished in condensed matter and quantum chemistry. There DFT has been enormously successful and has become a paradigm for predictive theory. For nuclear physics a major challenge is the theory of nuclear binding energies. I will discuss the present status of the DFT-based theory and the extensions needed to describe correlation effects.
ANL Physics Division Colloquium Schedule