Renormalization Group Evolution of Optical Potentials

To take full advantage of experimental facilities such as FRIB for applications to nuclear astrophysics, nuclear structure, and explorations of neutrinos and fundamental symmetries, we need a better understanding of the interplay of reaction and structure theory. Renormalization group (RG) techniques can treat reaction and structure components in a consistent manner, resulting in more accurate calculation of observables. As such, it is imperative to understand the behaviors of optical potentials under RG evolution, as these interactions simplify the many-body dynamics of a direct reaction to that of a few-body one. Here we apply similarity RG (or SRG) on a one-dimensional nuclear Hamiltonian to properly analyze the behaviors of the corresponding optical potential under RG transformations. We investigate how the optical potential decouples momenta during the RG evolution, as well as the evolution of the perturbativeness of the optical potential at each RG resolution scale. In addition, as the SRG introduces its own nonlocality, we will compare this to the nonlocality of the optical potential as well. We will further extend this analysis in future work to more realistic nuclear reactions, like the d(p,d)p process.