The field of nuclear structure aims at describing the observables associated with the ground state of nuclei as well as its low energy excitations. Depending on the number of neutrons and protons, a variety of different phenomena and structures manifest themselves in atomic nuclei. We study for example halo nuclei, the presence of nucleon clusters, deformations of the nuclear density or giant resonances. The research associated with the understanding of these phenomena is conducted at LMCE with the idea of coupling structural properties to the world of reactions and nuclear data evaluation. In this perspective, the objective of our structure studies is to build theoretical frameworks able to calculate accurately a wide spectrum of nuclear properties, for a very large range of nuclei and with as good a predictive power as possible.

In particular, we are interested in the interactions between nucleons, which we model either as effective interactions (Gogny interaction, relativistic density functional) or in an ab initio perspective based on chiral interactions. We also work on the resolution of the N-body problem based on these interactions. Our expertise includes mean field approximations (Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov) and beyond (QRPA, MPMH, PGCM, etc). The numerical resolution of these approaches benefits from the supercomputers of the CEA, DAM. On this topic, our researchers are working in close collaboration with French research institutes such as IRESNE (CEA), IRFU (CEA), IJCLab (CNRS) but also with researchers from the universities of Zagreb (Croatia) and Bielefeld (Germany).