Many-Body Theory of the Electroweak Nuclear Response

TL;DR

This paper reviews many-body nuclear theory and its application to electroweak responses, highlighting electron and neutrino scattering studies that reveal nuclear structure details and improve neutrino oscillation measurements.

Contribution

It extends nonrelativistic many-body theory to analyze electroweak responses, emphasizing applications to electron and neutrino scattering.

Findings

Electron scattering data reveal limitations of the shell model.

The formalism is extended to neutrino-nucleus interactions.

Understanding these interactions reduces uncertainties in neutrino experiments.

Abstract

After a brief review of the theoretical description of nuclei based on nonrelativistic many-body theory and realistic hamiltonians, these lectures focus on its application to the analysis of the electroweak response. Special emphasis is given to electron-nucleus scattering, whose experimental study has provided a wealth of information on nuclear structure and dynamics, exposing the limitations of the shell model. The extension of the formalism to the case of neutrino-nucleus interactions, whose quantitative understanding is required to reduce the systematic uncertainty of neutrino oscillation experiments, is also discussed.