Approaching nuclear interactions with lattice QCD

Abstract: Nuclei make up the majority of the visible matter in the Universe; obtaining a first principles description of the nuclear properties and interactions between nuclei directly from the underlying theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), is one of the main goals of the nuclear physics community. Although the theory was established nearly fifty years ago, the complexities of QCD at low energies precludes analytical solutions of the simplest hadronic systems, let alone the features of the nuclear forces. In this thesis we follow the lattice QCD approach, according to which QCD is solved non-perturbatively in a discretized space-time via large-scale numerical calculations. Specifically, the interactions between two octet baryons, with strangeness ranging from 0 to -4, are studied at low energies with larger-than-physical quark masses, and the low-energy coefficients in pionless effective field thepry relevant for two-baryon interactions, including those responsible for SU(3) flavor-symmetry breaking, are constrained.