The least understood part of the so successful Standard Model of the strong and electroweak forces is the formation of strongly interacting composites, like hadrons, atomic nuclei and hypernuclei. In addition, the nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang and in stars is fine-tuned at various places, which immediately leads to the question how much these fine-tunings can be offset to still lead to an habitable universe?

Over the last decade, the PI and his collaborators have further improved the chiral effective field theory for two- and three-nucleon forces, have pioneered and refined the extension of this approach to baryon-baryon interactions and, most importantly, have developed nuclear lattice effective field theory, which enabled them to solve longstanding problems in nuclear physics, like the ab initio calculation of the Hoyle state in ¹²C. Based on these achievements, this proposal will provide answers to: i) where are the limits of nuclear stability? ii) what hypernuclei can exist, what are their properties and how is the equation of state of neutron matter modied by the presence of strange quarks? and iii) what limits on the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model are set by the fine-tunings in nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang and in stars?

Apart from answering these big science questions, the proposal will, as a by-product, develop methods in effective field theories and Monte Carlo simulations that will be of use in other fields, such as cold atom and condensed matter physics.

• Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory
• Chiral Effective Field Theory for Few-Baryon Systems
• Auxiliary Field Quantum Monte Carlo simulations
• Impurity Lattice Monte Carlo simulations
• Pinhole and pinhole trace algorithms
• Chiral interpolations for hadron properties
• Adiabatic Projection Method
• Improved Actions based on Wigner SU(4) symmetry
• Local and non-local smearing algorithms
• Shuttle algorithm and GPU acceleration
• Eigenvector continuation