No Arabic abstract
The need to enforce fermionic antisymmetry in the nuclear many-body problem commonly requires use of single-particle coordinates, defined relative to some fixed origin. To obtain physical operators which nonetheless act on the nuclear many-body system in a Galilean-invariant fashion, thereby avoiding spurious center-of-mass contributions to observables, it is necessary to express these operators with respect to the translational intrinsic frame. Several commonly-encountered operators in nuclear many-body calculations, including the magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole operators (in the impulse approximation) and generators of SU(3) and Sp(3,R) symmetry groups, are bilinear in the coordinates and momenta of the nucleons and, when expressed in intrinsic form, become two-body operators. To work with such operators in a second-quantized many-body calculation, it is necessary to relate three distinct forms: the defining intrinsic-frame expression, an explicitly two-body expression in terms of two-particle relative coordinates, and a decomposition into one-body and separable two-body parts. We establish the relations between these forms, for general (non-scalar and non-isoscalar) operators bilinear in coordinates and momenta.
Precision tests of the Standard Model and searches for beyond the Standard Model physics often require nuclear structure input. There has been a tremendous progress in the development of nuclear ab initio techniques capable of providing accurate nuclear wave functions. For the calculation of observables, matrix elements of complicated operators need to be evaluated. Typically, these matrix elements would contain spurious contributions from the center-of-mass (COM) motion. This could be problematic when precision results are sought. Here, we derive a transformation relying on properties of harmonic oscillator wave functions that allows an exact removal of the COM motion contamination applicable to any one-body operator depending on nucleon coordinates and momenta. Resulting many-nucleon matrix elements are translationally invariant provided that the nuclear eigenfunctions factorize as products of the intrinsic and COM components as is the case, e.g., in the no-core shell model approach. An application of the transformation has been recently demonstrated in calculations of the nuclear structure recoil corrections for the beta-decay of 6He.
The application of renormalization group methods to microscopic nuclear many-body calculations is discussed. We present the solution of the renormalization group equations in the particle-hole channels for neutron matter and the application to S-wave pairing. Furthermore, we point out that the inclusion of tensor and spin-orbit forces leads to spin non-conserving effective interactions in nuclear matter.
[Background:] It is well known that effective nuclear interactions are in general nonlocal. Thus if nuclear densities obtained from {it ab initio} no-core-shell-model (NCSM) calculations are to be used in reaction calculations, translationally invariant nonlocal densities must be available. [Purpose:] Though it is standard to extract translationally invariant one-body local densities from NCSM calculations to calculate local nuclear observables like radii and transition amplitudes, the corresponding nonlocal one-body densities have not been considered so far. A major reason for this is that the procedure for removing the center-of-mass component from NCSM wavefunctions up to now has only been developed for local densities. [Results:] A formulation for removing center-of-mass contributions from nonlocal one-body densities obtained from NCSM and symmetry-adapted NCSM (SA-NCSM) calculations is derived, and applied to the ground state densities of $^4$He, $^6$Li, $^{12}$C, and $^{16}$O. The nonlocality is studied as a function of angular momentum components in momentum as well as coordinate space [Conclusions:] We find that the nonlocality for the ground state densities of the nuclei under consideration increases as a function of the angular momentum. The relative magnitude of those contributions decreases with increasing angular momentum. In general, the nonlocal structure of the one-body density matrices we studied is given by the shell structure of the nucleus, and can not be described with simple functional forms.
This is a very short presentation regarding developments in the theory of nuclear many-body problems, as seen and experienced by the author during the past 60 years with particular emphasis on the contributions of Gerry Brown and his research-group. Much of his work was based on Brueckners formulation of the nuclear many-body problem. It is reviewed briefly together with the Moszkowski-Scott separation method that was an important part of his early work. The core-polarisation and his work related to effective interactions in general are also addressed.
The UNEDF project was a large-scale collaborative effort that applied high-performance computing to the nuclear quantum many-body problem. UNEDF demonstrated that close associations among nuclear physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists can lead to novel physics outcomes built on algorithmic innovations and computational developments. This review showcases a wide range of UNEDF science results to illustrate this interplay.