Background: Collective excitations of nuclei and their theoretical descriptions provide an insight into the structure of nuclei. Replacing traditional phenomenological interactions with unitarily transformed realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions inc
reases the predictive power of the theoretical calculations for exotic or deformed nuclei. Purpose: Extend the application of realistic interactions to deformed nuclei and compare the performance of different interactions, including phenomenological interactions, for collective excitations in the sd-shell. Method: Ground-state energies and charge radii of 20-Ne, 28-Si and 32-S are calculated with the Hartree-Fock method. Transition strengths and transition densities are obtained in the Random Phase Approximation with explicit angular-momentum projection. Results: Strength distributions for monopole, dipole and quadrupole excitations are analyzed and compared to experimental data. Transition densities give insight into the structure of collective excitations in deformed nuclei. Conclusions: Unitarily transformed realistic interactions are able to describe the collective response in deformed sd-shell nuclei in good agreement with experimental data and as good or better than purely phenomenological interactions. Explicit angular momentum projection can have a significant impact on the response.
