Paul-Henri Heenen

Service de Physique Nucleaire, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Why and how to go beyond the mean-field method. Applications to neutron deficient Pb isotopes


The Hartree-Fock Bogoliubov method with effective interactions has been extremely successful in the description of the properties of exotic nuclei. However, to work in an intrinsic system of reference has several drawbacks and is justified only for nuclei with well defined deformation. The main deficiencies of the wave functions are that they are not eigenstates of angular momentum and particle number and that they have a fixed deformation. A single framework permits to cure these deficiencies: the generator coordinate method, which is equivalent to a configuration mixing method. I will show how this can be done in the particular mean-field method based on Skyrme interactions and on a discretization on a 3-dimensional mesh that has been developed by the Brussels-Paris collaboration. On specific examples, I will compare calculations of spectra and transition probabilities directory in the laboratory frame of reference to experimental data. Finally, I will discuss how to calculate systematically the correlation energies due to angular momentum projection and to quadrupolar vibrations in order to incorporate them in a microscopic theory of nuclear masses.

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