Beyond Mean-Field Calculations for Odd-A Nuclei

Beyond mean-field methods are very successful tools for the description of large-amplitude collective motion for even-even atomic nuclei. The state-of-the-art framework of these methods consists in a Generator Coordinate Method based on angular-momentum and particle-number projected triaxially deformed Hatree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) states. The extension of this scheme to odd-mass nuclei is a long-standing challenge. We present for the first time such an extension, where the Generator Coordinate space is built from self-consistently blocked one-quasiparticle HFB states. One of the key points for this success is that the same Skyrme interaction is used for the mean-field and the pairing channels, thus avoiding problems related to the violation of the Pauli principle. An application to 25Mg illustrates the power of our method, as agreement with experiment is obtained for the spectrum, electromagnetic moments, and transition strengths, for both positive and negative parity states and without the necessity for effective charges or effective moments. Although the effective interaction still requires improvement, our study opens the way to systematically describe odd-A nuclei throughout the nuclear chart.

New parameterization of Skyrmes interaction for regularized multi-reference energy density functional calculations

[Background] Symmetry restoration and configuration mixing in the spirit of the generator coordinate method based on energy density functionals have become widely used techniques in low-energy nuclear structure physics. Recently, it has been pointed out that these techniques are ill-defined for standard Skyrme functionals, and a regularization procedure has been proposed to remove the resulting spuriosities from such calculations. This procedure imposes an integer power of the density for the density dependent terms of the functional. At present, only dated parameterizations of the Skyrme interaction fulfill this condition. [Purpose] To construct a set of parameterizations of the Skyrme energy density functional for multi-reference energy density functional calculations with regularization using the state-of-the-art fitting protocols. [Method] The parameterizations were adjusted to reproduce ground state properties of a selected set of doubly magic nuclei and properties of nuclear matter. Subsequently, these parameter sets were validated against properties of spherical and deformed nuclei. [Results] Our parameter sets successfully reproduce the experimental binding energies and charge radii for a wide range of singly-magic nuclei. Compared to the widely used SLy5 and to the SIII parameterization that has integer powers of the density, a significant improvement of the reproduction of the data is observed. Similarly, a good description of the deformation properties at $Asim 80$ was obtained. [Conclusions] We have constructed new Skyrme parameterizations with integer powers of the density and validated them against a broad set of experimental data for spherical and deformed nuclei. These parameterizations are tailor-made for regularized multi-reference energy density functional calculations and can be used to study correlations beyond the mean-field in atomic nuclei.

Symmetry restoration for odd-mass nuclei with a Skyrme energy density functional

In these proceedings, we report first results for particle-number and angular-momentum projection of self-consistently blocked triaxial one-quasiparticle HFB states for the description of odd-A nuclei in the context of regularized multi-reference energy density functionals, using the entire model space of occupied single-particle states. The SIII parameterization of the Skyrme energy functional and a volume-type pairing interaction are used.