Advancing Few-Body Methods for Nuclear Reactions

\par Nuclear Physics was established with Rutherford's scattering experiment which used an alpha-beam to study nuclei. Today similar scattering reactions are used to study unstable nuclei structure. Given the wide range of applications of nuclear physics across the scientific landscape including energy, medicine, agriculture, astrophysics and more, it is important to have a robust theoretical framework for reactions. \par Some important reactions beyond elastic scattering include breakup (where the incoming projectile nucleus breaks up in two or more fragments) and transfer (where a nucleon or nucleon cluster is transferred between the projectile and the target). If the degrees of freedom of a system allow it, an effective few-body model can be used. Our group is interested in deuteron induced reactions which can be mapped onto a three-body problem with neutron+proton+nucleus. \par We introduce several few-body techniques used to study reactions and their connection to nuclear structure. Specific applications will be shown using the Faddeev approach, since this framework offers exact solutions to the nuclear scattering problem. An accessible discussion of this method will be provided, as well as an overview of new developments in the pipeline.