Harmonic-oscillator excitations of precise few-body wave functions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to calculate harmonic oscillator excitation probabilities in precise few-body wave functions, revealing how different nucleon interactions influence these distributions and highlighting the roles of tensor and short-range correlations.

Contribution

It develops a novel approach for analyzing HO excitation probabilities in few-body systems using correlated Gaussian basis functions, providing new insights into nucleon interaction effects.

Findings

Tensor and short-range correlations enhance high HO excitations.

Interaction dependence is reduced in excited states of 4He.

High HO quanta describe relative motion between clusters.

Abstract

A method for calculating the occupation probability of the number of harmonic oscillator (HO) quanta is developed for a precise few-body wave function obtained in a correlated Gaussian basis. The probability distributions of two- to four-nucleon wave functions obtained using different nucleon- nucleon (NN) interactions are analyzed to gain insight into the characteristic behavior of the various interactions. Tensor correlations as well as short-range correlations play a crucial role in enhancing the probability of high HO excitations. For the excited states of 4He, the interaction dependence is much less because high HO quanta are mainly responsible for describing the relative motion function between the 3N+N (3H+p and 3He+n) clusters.