Abstract: Nuclei being the fuel of Stars and the core of matter, studying their structure and how they interact is therefore essential to understand where we come from and how the Universe is evolving. Radioactive Ion Beams facilities, such as ATLAS and FRIB, enable the study of radioactive elements, revealing unexpected features that challenge our understanding of nuclear properties. Because reactions are diverse probes for unstable nuclei, their rates need to be accurately predicted to refine our understanding, to guide experimental efforts, and to support the interpretation of measurements.

In this seminar, I will first show how ab initio theory can help reducing the uncertainties on reaction rates of astrophysical interests and how these microscopic calculations can be integrated within few-body methods to predict reaction rates at higher energies. I will finally discuss how one can leverage recent development in phenomenological optical potentials to improve our description of one-nucleon knockout and transfer reactions, and hence to increase the accuracy of the spectroscopic information extracted from these data. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under the FRIB Theory Alliance Award No. DE-SC0013617 and by LLNL under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344.”