Shortcuts to nuclear structure: lessons in Hartree-Fock, RPA, and the no-core shell model

The Unitary Correlation Operator Method (UCOM) provides a means for nuclear structure calculations starting from realistic NN potentials. The dominant short-range central and tensor correlations are described explicitly by a unitary transformation. The application of UCOM in the context of the no-core shell model provides insight into the interplay between dominant short-range and residual long-range correlations in the nuclear many-body problem. The use of the correlated int...

Nuclear structure and reaction theory are undergoing a major renaissance with advances in many-body methods, strong interactions with greatly improved links to Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the advent of high performance computing, and improved computational algorithms. Predictive power, with well-quantified uncertainty, is emerging from non-perturbative approaches along with the potential for new discoveries such as predicting nuclear phenomena before they are measured. We p...

Reliable predictions of the static and dynamic properties of a nucleus require a fully microscopic description of both ground and excited states of this complicated many-body quantum system. Predictive calculations are key to understanding such systems and are important ingredients for simulating stellar environments and for enabling a variety of contemporary nuclear applications. Challenges that theory has to address include accounting for nuclear deformation and the ability...

We present a brief overview of recent developments in ab initio calculations of nuclear scattering and reactions with a focus on applications of the no-core shell model with continuum method.

There has been significant recent progress in solving the long-standing problems of how nuclear shell structure and collective motion emerge from underlying microscopic inter-nucleon interactions. We review a selection of recent significant results within the ab initio No Core Shell Model (NCSM) closely tied to three major factors enabling this progress: (1) improved nuclear interactions that accurately describe the experimental two-nucleon and three-nucleon interaction data;...

The structure and reactions of light nuclei represent fundamental and formidable challenges for microscopic theory based on realistic strong interaction potentials. Several {\it ab initio} methods have now emerged that provide nearly exact solutions for some nuclear properties. The {\it ab initio} no core shell model (NCSM) and the no core full configuration (NCFC) method, frame this quantum many-particle problem as a large sparse matrix eigenvalue problem where one evaluates...

The nuclear shell model has been perhaps the most important conceptual and computational paradigm for the understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei. While the shell model has been predominantly used in a phenomenological context, there have been efforts stretching back over a half century to derive shell model parameters based on a realistic interaction between nucleons. More recently, several ab initio many-body methods---in particular many-body perturbation theory, th...

A brief review of models to describe nuclear structure and reactions properties is presented, starting from the historical shell model picture and encompassing modern ab initio approaches. A selection of recent theoretical results on observables for exotic light and medium-mass nuclei is shown. Emphasis is given to the comparison with experiment and to what can be learned about three-body forces and continuum properties.

We present developments and applications for the diagonalization of shell-model hamiltonians in a discrete non-orthogonal basis (DNO-SM). The method, and its actual numerical implementation CARINA, based on mean-field and beyond-mean field techniques has already been applied in previous studies and is focused on basis states selection optimization. The method is benchmarked against a full set of $sd$ shell exact diagonalizations, and is applied for the first time to the heavy...

We present an overview of recent results and developments of the no-core shell model (NCSM), an ab initio approach to the nuclear many-body problem for light nuclei. In this approach, we start from realistic two-nucleon or two- plus three-nucleon interactions. Many-body calculations are performed using a finite harmonic-oscillator (HO) basis. To facilitate convergence for realistic inter-nucleon interactions that generate strong short-range correlations, we derive effective i...