Correlations in Nuclear Matter

TL;DR

This paper compares the correlation properties of nuclear matter using LOCV and BHF methods, establishing their formal connection and analyzing their equations of state with and without three-body forces.

Contribution

It provides a formal link between LOCV and BHF correlation functions and compares their results, showing their close agreement under various conditions.

Findings

Correlation functions are similar, indicating approximate locality and momentum independence.

The equations of state from both methods are close when three-body forces are included.

Correlation functions agree regardless of the inclusion of three-body forces.

Abstract

We analyze the nuclear matter correlation properties in terms of the pair correlation function. To this aim we systematically compare the results for the variational method in the Lowest Order Constrained Variational (LOCV) approximation and for the Bruekner-Hartree-Fock (BHF) scheme. A formal link between the Jastrow correlation factor of LOCV and the Defect Function (DF) of BHF is established and it is shown under which conditions and approximations the two approaches are equivalent. From the numerical comparison it turns out that the two correlation functions are quite close, which indicates in particular that the DF is approximately local and momentum independent. The Equations of State (EOS) of Nuclear Matter in the two approaches are also compared. It is found that once the three-body forces (TBF) are introduced the two EOS are fairly close, while the agreement between the correlation functions holds with or without TBF.