Few-Body Systems (EFB22) manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor)

Abstract We summarize recent advances in ab initio nuclear structure theory, aiming to connect few- and many-body systems in a coherent theoretical framework. Starting from chiral effective field theory to construct the nuclear Hamiltonian and the similarity renormalization group to soften it, we address several many-body approaches that have seen major developments over the past few years. We show that the domain of ab initio nuclear structure theory has been pushed well beyond the p-shell and that quantitative predictions connected to QCD via chiral effective field theory are becoming possible all the way from the proton to the neutron drip line up into the medium-mass regime