Determining the interaction between two nuclei is a long-standing and challenging problem. It constitutes an important input in the modeling of nuclear reactions, which provide key information about the structure of nuclei and are relevant for reactions of astrophysical interest. This interaction has typically been modeled by phenomenological potentials, whose parameters are adjusted to reproduce elastic-scattering data. Albeit precise when Experimental data exist, these potentials lack predictive behavior and do not
have controlled uncertainties. We present the first determination of double-folding potentials based on chiral effective field theory (EFT) up to next-to-next-to-leading order (N2LO). To this end, we construct new two-body soft local chiral EFTinteractions. We benchmark this approach in 16O16O collisions, and extend it to processes involving non closed-shell nuclei, such as 12C12C scattering. We present results for cross sections computed for elastic scattering at energies up to 1000 MeV, as well as for the astrophysical S-factor of the fusion.

Thanks to the predictive power of this approach, we can use only one potential for each projectile-target system to calculate various reaction observables. Our analysis of These various reaction observables has enabled us to study the impact of the nuclear density and the nucleon-nucleon interaction on the corresponding cross sections.