Configuration-interaction time-dependent density functional theory for nuclear dynamics

TL;DR

The paper develops a configuration-interaction time-dependent density functional theory (CI-TDDFT) for nuclear dynamics, extending conventional TDDFT by including configuration mixing and correlations, and demonstrates its application to nuclear resonances.

Contribution

It introduces a novel CI-TDDFT framework that incorporates beyond-mean-field correlations in nuclear dynamics, preserving conservation laws and improving resonance descriptions.

Findings

Energy and particle number are conserved within 4e-4 during evolution.

CI-TDDFT produces broader resonance strength distributions than TDDFT.

Main peak positions in resonances are similar to those from TDDFT.

Abstract

A configuration-interaction time-dependent density functional theory (CI-TDDFT) for nuclear dynamics is developed. In this framework, the correlated nuclear many-body wave function is expanded in terms of time-dependent many-particle configurations built from a common set of orthonormal single-particle states. The equations of motion for both the expansion coefficients and the single-particle states are derived self-consistently using the Dirac-Frenkel time-dependent variational principle. This formulation extends conventional time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) by incorporating configuration mixing and beyond-mean-field correlations, while preserving energy and particle-number conservation. As an illustrative application, the method is implemented using the relativistic point-coupling functional PC-PK1 in the particle-hole channel and a monopole pairing interaction in the particle-particle channel, and is applied to the study of isoscalar giant monopole resonance in $^{58}$Ni and $^{60}$Ni. Numerical tests show that both the total energy and particle number are conserved, with relative deviations within $4\times 10^{-4}$ during the time evolution. Compared with conventional TDDFT, CI-TDDFT yields broader strength distributions for giant monopole resonances while keeping the main peak positions close to those from TDDFT. This broadening is associated with configuration mixing in the valence space and suggests a coupling of the monopole oscillation to additional collective degrees of freedom. These results demonstrate the potential of CI-TDDFT as a quantum, microscopic beyond-mean-field framework for nuclear dynamics.