Emergent complexity from strong interactions
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.