Recent advances in the quantification of uncertainties in reaction theory

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in quantifying uncertainties in nuclear reaction theory, emphasizing the role of statistical tools in analyzing optical potentials and their impact on reaction observables.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of methods for uncertainty quantification in nuclear reaction models, focusing on optical potentials and their effects on reaction predictions.

Findings

Uncertainty propagation from optical potentials to reaction observables.

Comparison of different reaction theories in uncertainty analysis.

Use of statistical tools for constraining optical potentials.

Abstract

Uncertainty quantification has become increasingly more prominent in nuclear physics over the past several years. In few-body reaction theory, there are four main sources that contribute to the uncertainties in the calculated observables: the effective potentials, approximations made to the few-body problem, structure functions, and degrees of freedom left out of the model space. In this work, we illustrate some of the features that can be obtained when modern statistical tools are applied in the context of nuclear reactions. This work consists of a summary of the progress that has been made in quantifying theoretical uncertainties in this domain, focusing primarily on those uncertainties coming from the effective optical potential as well as their propagation within various reaction theories. We use, as the central example, reactions on the doubly-magic stable nucleus $^{40}$Ca, namely neutron and proton elastic scattering and single-nucleon transfer $^{40}$Ca(d,p)$^{41}$Ca. First, we show different optimization schemes used to constrain the optical potential from differential cross sections and other experimental constraints; we then discuss how these uncertainties propagate to the transfer cross section, comparing two reaction theories. We finish by laying out our future plans.