New trial wave function for nuclear cluster structure of nuclei

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel trial wave function for nuclear systems that exactly solves the center-of-mass problem and allows flexible variational treatment of nucleon and cluster widths, demonstrated on the ${^{20}{ m Ne}}$ nucleus.

Contribution

The paper presents a new wave function approach that explicitly handles the center-of-mass issue and incorporates variable widths for nucleons and clusters, enhancing nuclear structure modeling.

Findings

Exact removal of spurious center-of-mass motion.

Variational energy calculations for ${^{20}{ m Ne}}$.

Flexible treatment of cluster and nucleon widths.

Abstract

A new trial wave function is proposed for nuclear physics, in which an exact solution to the long-standing center-of-mass problem is given. In the new approach, the widths of the single-nucleon Gaussian wave packets and the widths of the relative Gaussian wave functions describing correlations of nucleons or clusters are treated as variables in the explicit intrinsic wave function of the nuclear system. As an example, this new wave function was applied to study the typical ${^{20}{\rm Ne}}$ ($\alpha$+${{^{16}}{\rm O}}$) cluster system. By removing exactly the spurious center-of-mass effect in a very simple way, the energy curve of ${^{20}{\rm Ne}}$ was obtained by the variational calculations with the width of $\alpha$ cluster, the width of ${{^{16}}{\rm O}}$ cluster, and the size parameter of the nucleus. They are considered as the three crucial variational variables in describing the ${^{20}{\rm Ne}}$ ($\alpha$+${{^{16}}{\rm O}}$) cluster system. This shows that the new wave function can be a very interesting new tool for studying many-body and cluster effects in nuclear physics.