Relativistic Nuclear Energy Density Functionals: Mean-Field and Beyond

TL;DR

Relativistic energy density functionals are essential tools in nuclear physics, enabling accurate modeling of nuclear properties and excitations, including beyond mean-field effects and collective phenomena across a wide range of nuclei.

Contribution

This paper reviews the development and application of relativistic nuclear energy density functionals, highlighting advances in mean-field and beyond mean-field models for nuclear structure.

Findings

Successful description of nuclear ground states and excitations

Inclusion of collective correlations improves predictive power

Application to exotic and heavy nuclei

Abstract

Relativistic energy density functionals (EDF) have become a standard tool for nuclear structure calculations, providing a complete and accurate, global description of nuclear ground states and collective excitations. Guided by the medium dependence of the microscopic nucleon self-energies in nuclear matter, semi-empirical functionals have been adjusted to the nuclear matter equation of state and to bulk properties of finite nuclei, and applied to studies of arbitrarily heavy nuclei, exotic nuclei far from stability, and even systems at the nucleon drip-lines. REDF-based structure models have also been developed that go beyond the static mean-field approximation, and include collective correlations related to the restoration of broken symmetries and to fluctuations of collective variables. These models are employed in analyses of structure phenomena related to shell evolution, including detailed predictions of excitation spectra and electromagnetic transition rates.