Faster than a Ferrari: Utilizing dimensionality reduction techniques to emulate nuclear beta decay calculations

Nuclear beta decay is one of the fundamental decay modes of a nucleus, mediated by a weak nuclear interaction. It exchanges a proton into a neutron (or vice-versa) while emitting a lepton and a neutrino. The significance of beta-decay spans many fields of physics, including tests of fundamental symmetries, explanation of the abundance of chemical elements heavier than iron, and probing the structure of nuclei themselves, etc. An important point of observation for beta-decay is its half-life. Although half-life values can be experimentally measured, measurements for nuclei with large neutron numbers (neutron-rich) are currently unobtainable due to technological and experimental limitations. The absence of these measurements presents many problems within astrophysical processes, where the decay rates of neutron-rich nuclei are of great importance. Therefore, there is significant motivation for theoretical predictions of beta-decay half-lives. In contributing to this goal, we employ a theoretical framework based on the energy density functional theory (EDFT) with the quasiparticle random-phase approximation (QRPA). EDFT and QRPA can be intercorrelated with beta-decay matrix elements as EDFT determines the nuclear ground state while the QRPA probes the excited states. However, such calculations can be very time-consuming, and studies which require substantial calculations are often prohibitive. In this project, we employ dimensionality reduction techniques to emulate solutions of QRPA equations, thereby reducing the size of QRPA whilst maintaining a high accuracy of solutions. Preliminary results of our investigation will be presented.