Ab initio theory for heavy nuclei and physics beyond the standard model

Breakthroughs in our treatment of the many-body problem in strongly interacting systems, as well as nuclear forces, are rapidly transforming modern nuclear theory into a global first-principles discipline. This allows us to address some of the most exciting questions at the frontiers of nuclear structure and physics beyond the standard model (BSM), such as the nature of dark matter, neutrino masses, and searches for violations of fundamental symmetries in nature.

In this talk I will briefly outline our many-body approach, the valence-space in-medium similarity renormalization group, and how recent advances now allow us to calculate converged properties of open-shell nuclei to ²⁰⁸Pb, where I highlight first ab initio predictions for the neutron skin and inputs for r-process nucleosynthesis. I will then focus on connections to key topics in BSM physics: converged ab initio neutrinoless double-beta decay nuclear matrix elements for all major players in global searches (⁷⁶Ge, ¹³⁰Te, and ¹³⁶Xe), spin-dependent WIMP-nucleus scattering for all relevant detector nuclei, and coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering in all nuclei considered in ongoing searches.