Alfredo Poves

Fellowship 2015

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After a Master in Physics at the University of Zaragoza, Alfredo Poves obtained his PhD at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). He did postdoc at the CRN (Centre de Recherche Nucléaire, Strasbourg) thanks to a Joliot-Curie Fellowship and became Chargé de Recherches. He is promoted full Professor at the UAM in 1984, where he also has been Vice-Rector, Chairman of the Department of Theoretical Physics and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics. He is a Member of the PAC several european laboratories, including GANIL, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the ECT* (Trento), Scientific Advisor of the Ministry of Education and Science and Chairman of the CNEAI (Spanish Commission for the Evaluation of the Researchers).

His field of research is on theoretical nuclear structure, being a founder of the Strasbourg Madrid Shell Model collaboration SM*2 ; his main topics of research are the spectroscopy of exotic nuclei, the microscopic description of the emergence of collective behavior in nuclei and its understanding in terms of the symmetries of the nucleon-nucleon interaction and the nuclear structure aspects of the neutrinoless double beta decays. The article "The Shell Model as a Unified View of Nuclear Structure" published in Reviews of Modern Physics, which gathers many of the SM*2 contributions, has become a classic in the field. Member of the Editorial Boards of Nuclear Physics A and Physical Review C., Alfredo Poves has been invited Professor at the University of Strasbourg, Scientific Associate at CERN and Visiting Scientist at TRIUMF (Vancouver). He received the GENCO Award and is Member of the Academia Europaea.

Microscopic Description of Exotic Nuclei: New Frontiers

Nuclei with extreme ratios of neutrons to protons, close to the neutron or proton drip lines, are a continued source of new phenomena (neutron halos, disappearance of magic numbers, shape coexistence, hyper-allowed beta decays, etc) as well as key elements in our understanding of many nuclear astrophysical scenarios such as the supernovae explosions and the associated nucleosynthetic processes. In this project, our theoretical approach to their  structure will be the shell model with full configuration mixing in large valence spaces (SM-CI).  We aim to describe the region of the nuclear chart south of 78Ni searching for a new island of deformation around 74Cr and its possible merging with the established one surrounding 64Cr which we predicted some time ago. In addition we shall study the heaviest N=Z nuclei from 64Ge to 100Sn, where rapid changes of shape and structure take place, with the heuristic help of our Quasi+Pseudo SU3 model. Another goal of the research project is to pursue our previous studies of the nuclear structure aspects of the neutrinoless double beta decays. Once the neutrino oscillations experimentally found (Physics Nobel Prize 2015),  this extremely rare decay process, if detected,  will sign the Majorana nature of the neutrinos (that they are their own antiparticles), one of the present unknowns of the standard model of the elementary particles and interactions. The nuclear matrix elements of the process which we calculate, are  a necessary ingredient to extract from the experimental lifetime the mass and the hierarchy of the neutrinos.