The coupled-cluster wave function factorizes to a very good approximation into a product of an intrinsic wave function and a Gaussian for the center-of-mass coordinate. The width of the Gaussian is in general not identical to the oscillator length of the underlying single-particle basis. The quality of the separation can be verified by a simple procedure.
Broydens method, widely used in quantum chemistry electronic-structure calculations for the numerical solution of nonlinear equations in many variables, is applied in the context of the nuclear many-body problem. Examples include the unitary gas problem, the nuclear density functional theory with Skyrme functionals, and the nuclear coupled-cluster theory. The stability of the method, its ease of use, and its rapid convergence rates make Broydens method a tool of choice for large-scale nuclear structure calculations.
We present here a first application of the Fermionic Molecular Dynamics (FMD) approach to low-energy nuclear reactions, namely the $^3$He($alpha$,$gamma$)$^7$Be radiative capture reaction. We divide the Hilbert space into an external region where the system is described as $^3$He and $^4$He clusters interacting only via the Coulomb interaction and an internal region where the nuclear interaction will polarize the clusters. Polarized configurations are obtained by a variation after parity and angular momentum projection procedure with respect to the parameters of all single particle states. A constraint on the radius of the intrinsic many-body state is employed to obtain polarized clusters at desired distances. The boundary conditions for bound and scattering states are implemented using the Bloch operator. The FMD calculations reproduce the correct energy for the centroid of the $3/2^-$ and $1/2^-$ bound states in $^7$Be. The charge radius of the ground state is in good agreement with recent experimental results. The FMD calculations also describe well the experimental phase shift data in the $1/2^+$, $3/2^+$ and $5/2^+$ channels that are important for the capture reaction at low energies. Using the bound and scattering many-body wave functions we calculate the radiative capture cross section. The calculated $S$ factor agrees very well, both in absolute normalization and energy dependence, with the recent experimental data from the Weizmann, LUNA, Seattle and ERNA experiments.
The similarity renormalization group (SRG) has been successfully applied to soften interactions for ab initio nuclear calculations. In almost all practical applications in nuclear physics, an SRG generator with the kinetic energy operator is used. With this choice, a fast convergence of many-body calculations can be achieved, but at the same time substantial three-body interactions are induced even if one starts from a purely two-nucleon (NN) Hamiltonian. Three-nucleon (3N) interactions can be handled by modern many-body methods. However, it has been observed that when including initial chiral 3N forces in the Hamiltonian, the SRG transformations induce a non-negligible four-nucleon interaction that cannot be currently included in the calculations for technical reasons. Consequently, it is essential to investigate alternative SRG generators that might suppress the induction of many-body forces while at the same time might preserve the good convergence. In this work we test two alternative generators with operators of block structure in the harmonic oscillator basis. In the no-core shell model calculations for 3H, 4He and 6Li with chiral NN force, we demonstrate that their performances appear quite promising.
We present several coupled-cluster calculations of ground and excited states of 4He and 16O employing methods from quantum chemistry. A comparison of coupled cluster results with the results of exact diagonalization of the hamiltonian in the same model space and other truncated shell-model calculations shows that the quantum chemistry inspired coupled cluster approximations provide an excellent description of ground and excited states of nuclei, with much less computational effort than traditional large-scale shell-model approaches. Unless truncations are made, for nuclei like 16O, full-fledged shell-model calculations with four or more major shells are not possible. However, these and even larger systems can be studied with the coupled cluster methods due to the polynomial rather than factorial scaling inherent in standard shell-model studies. This makes the coupled cluster approaches, developed in quantum chemistry, viable methods for describing weakly bound systems of interest for future nuclear facilities.
A finite rank separable approximation for the quasiparticle RPA calculations with Skyrme interactions that was proposed in our previous work is extended to take into account the coupling between one- and two-phonon terms in the wave functions of excited states. It is shown that characteristics calculated within the suggested approach are in a good agreement with available experimental data.