Quantum information informing insights into nuclear structure

Atomic nuclei are quantum systems with rich behaviors. While their structure has been studied for decades, in recent years ideas from quantum information have provided new lenses for investigations. Numerical experiments have shown that the proton and neutron partitions of shell model wave functions are relatively weakly entangled, leading to a new and powerful approximation that can dramatically extend the reach of such calculations, while the entanglement spectrum provides a tool to examine our usual assumptions about n-body clusters (pairs and alpha-like quartets) in nuclei.