Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering in a Wave-Packet Formalism

Licentiate thesis, 2020

In this thesis I analyse the prospect of leveraging statistical analyses of the strong nuclear interaction by using the wave-packet continuum discretisation (WPCD) method to efficiently compute nucleon-nucleon (NN) scattering observables on a graphics processing unit (GPU). The WPCD method gives approximate solutions to the S-matrix at multiple scattering energies at the cost of a single eigendecomposition of the NN channel Hamiltonian. In particular, I demonstrate and analyse the accuracy and inherent parallelism of the WPCD method by computing the most common NN scattering observables using a chiral Hamiltonian at next-to-next-to-leading order. I present an in-depth numerical study of the WPCD method and the GPU acceleration thereof. Additionally, I discuss which windows of opportunity are open for studying the strong nuclear interaction using data from few-nucleon scattering experiments.