Christian Forssén

About Christian's research

I research in theoretical nuclear and particle physics. Some examples of questions that we are interested in: How did our elements originate and why are there many of some and few of others? How does a neutron star actually work? Can we use nuclear processes to understand more about our universe, such as the existence of dark matter? My tools for answering these questions are theoretical models and high-performance computers.
In particular, we work with something called effective theories. An atomic nucleus consists of neutrons and protons. But these in turn consist of even smaller constituents, quarks and gluons. My research is located at the border between these two length scales, and I try to understand how we can construct effective theories for nucleons based on what we know about the strong interaction between quarks. A major ambition is also to take into account what we do not know! How do the details that we are not familiar with, or simply choose not to consider in our theoretical model, affect the uncertainty in the predictions we make. Or to put it briefly: How can we quantify what we do not know?