The weakly bound exotic 11 Be nucleus, famous for its ground-state parity inversion and distinct n+ 10 Be halo structure, is investigated from first principles using chiral two-and three-nucleon forces. An explicit treatment of continuum effects is found to be indispensable. We study the sensitivity of the 11 Be spectrum to the details of the three-nucleon force and demonstrate that only certain chiral interactions are capable of reproducing the parity inversion. With such interactions, the extremely large E1 transition between the bound states is reproduced. We compare our photodisintegration calculations to conflicting experimental data and predict a distinct dip around the 3/2 − 1 resonance energy. Finally, we predict low-lying 3/2 + and 9/2 + resonances that are not or not sufficiently measured in experiments.The theoretical understanding of exotic neutron-rich nuclei constitutes a tremendous challenge. These systems often cannot be explained by mean-field approaches and contradict the regular shell structure. The spectrum of 11 Be has some very peculiar features. The 1/2 + ground state (g.s.) is loosely bound by 502 keV with respect to the n+ 10 Be threshold and is separated by only 320 keV from its parity-inverted 1/2 − partner [1, 2], which would be the expected g.s. in the standard shell-model picture. Such parity inversion, already noticed by Talmi and Unna [3] in the early 1960s, is one of the best examples of the disappearance of the N = 8 magic number with an increasing neutron to proton ratio. The next (n+n+ 9 Be) breakup threshold appears at 7.31 MeV [4], such that the rich resonance structure at low energies is dominated by the n+ 10 Be dynamics. Peculiar also is the electricdipole transition strength between the two bound states, which has attracted much attention since its first measurement in 1971 [5] and was remeasured in 1983 [6] and 2014 [7]. It is the strongest known transition between low-lying states, attributed to the halo character of 11 Be.An accurate description of this complex spectrum is anticipated to be sensitive to the details of the nuclear force [8], such that a precise knowledge of the nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction, desirably obtained from first principles, is crucial. Moreover, the inclusion of three-nucleon (3N) effects has been found to be indispensable for an accurate description of nuclear systems [9,10]. The chiral effective field theory constitutes one of the most promising candidates for deriving the nuclear interaction. Formulated by Weinberg [11][12][13], it is based on the fundamental symmetries of QCD and uses pions and nucleons as relevant degrees of freedom. Within this theory NN, 3N and higher many-body interactions arise in a natural hierarchy [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. The details of these interactions depend on the specific choices made during the construction. In particular the way the interactions are constrained to experimental data can have a strong impact [18].In this work we tackle the question if ab initio calculations can provide an accurate des...