Abstract
Few years ago we started the investigation of microscopic Optical Potentials
(OP) in the framework of chiral effective field theories and published our
results in a series of manuscripts. Starting from the very first work, where a
microscopic OP was introduced following the multiple scattering procedure of
Watson, and then followed by more recent works, where the agreement with
experimental data and phenomenological approaches was successfully tested, we
finally arrived at a description of elastic scattering processes off non-zero
spin nuclei. Among our achievements, it is worth mentioning the partial
inclusion of three-nucleon forces, and the extension of our OP to
antiproton-nucleus elastic scattering. Despite the overall good agreement with
empirical data obtained so far, we do believe that several improvements and
upgrades of the present approach are still to be achieved. In this short essay
we would like to address some of the most relevant achievements and discuss an
interesting development that, in our opinion, is needed to further improve
microscopic OPs in order to reach in a near future the same level of accuracy
of the phenomenological ones.