Ab Initio Methods for Nuclear Structure and Reactions: From Few to Many Nucleons

Abstract

These lecture notes intend to give a brief overview of some ab initio approaches currently used to study nuclear structure properties and reactions. In the first part particular attention is devoted to two methods useful to account for bound state properties. They are both based on the diagonalization of the full many-body Hamiltonian matrix, but share in addition the use of similarity transformations. Transforming the bare potential into an effective one, the latter help in speeding up the convergence of the results. In the second part ab initio methods for reaction cross sections involving the continuum part of the nuclear spectrum is described, with emphasis on perturbation induced reactions. They are based on integral transforms which make it possible to reduce the many-body scattering problem to a bound state problem, allowing to take advantage of any of the methods described in the first part.