Anna McCoy

My research focuses on developing ab initio methods to predict the properties of atomic nuclei directly from the fundamental interactions between protons and neutrons. In this approach, the goal is to describe nuclear structure and reactions starting from these basic building blocks alone, without relying on phenomenological adjustments tailored to each individual nucleus. By comparing these first-principles predictions with experiment, I work to uncover the underlying symmetries, correlations and patterns that emerge in nuclei.

A major part of this effort is understanding how nuclear structure evolves as we move away from the valley of stability, into regions of rare and short-lived isotopes where familiar shell patterns can change and entirely new forms of behavior can emerge. In these exotic systems, nuclei may exhibit shape coexistence, where very different intrinsic shapes can appear at nearly the same energy, or develop extended matter distributions that produce halo nuclei, in which one or two nucleons form a diffuse cloud around a more tightly bound core. I am also interested in clustering phenomena, where nucleons organize into substructures inside the nucleus, revealing another level of emergent simplicity within the complex quantum many-body problem.

To address these questions, I combine modern many-body theory with group theoretical techniques that expose the symmetries and geometric structures hidden in nuclear dynamics. These mathematical tools help identify the essential degrees of freedom governing collective motion and provide powerful ways to simplify otherwise intractable calculations. At the same time, I leverage high performance computing — and explore opportunities with quantum computing — to extend nuclear theory predictions to increasingly complex nuclei, reactions and regions of the nuclear chart. By bringing together first-principles theory, symmetry-based methods and advanced computing, my work aims to push the limits of predictive nuclear science and deepen our understanding of how complex structure emerges from the fundamental forces inside the atomic nucleus.

Appointments

• Assistant Physicist, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA (2023-present)
• FRIB Theory Fellow: Washington University, Saint Louis, MO, USA (2022-2023)
• Postdoctoral Fellow: Institute for Nuclear Theory, Seattle, WA, USA (2020-2022)
• Postdoctoral Fellow: TRIUMF, Vancouver, BC, Canada (2017-2020)

Education

• Ph.D., Physics, University of Notre Dame (May 2018) 
• M.S., Theoretical Physics, University of Waterloo (Oct. 2011); Perimeter Scholars International, Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics
• B.A., Physics and French, with honors, Grinnell College (May 2010)