QLunch: Marvin Schulz

Speaker: Marvin Schulz

Title: Recent Advances on the Liquid Drop Model of the Nucleus

Abstract:  The Liquid Drop Model, introduced by Gamow, describes the nucleus of an atom through the competition between surface tension and Coulomb repulsion.

It was conjectured roughly ten years ago that the unique minimizers are spheres up to a critical mass of the drop and that no minimizers exist above this threshold.

I will present my recent progress on the nonexistence problem, using inequalities from the classical capillarity problem for liquid drops. My work improves and extends earlier work by Frank, Killip, and Nam.

I will also briefly discuss a very recent proof that proves the full conjecture by Chodosh and Gianocca. According to the authors’ AI statement, the results were obtained by ChatGPT 5.6 Pro over a series of chats, without significant assistance from the authors.