Session D5 - Recent Developments in Computational Nuclear Physics.
INVITED session, Saturday afternoon, May 01
Governor's Square 14, Adam's Mark Hotel
Construction of accurate nucleon-nucleon potentials and increases in computing power have led in recent years to the development of new methods capable of solving the nuclear structure problem for systems of more than four nucleons. In this talk, I will describe one of these methods, the ab initio no-core shell model. The principal foundation of this approach is the use of effective interactions appropriate for the large but finite basis spaces employed in the calculations. These effective interactions are derived from the underlying realistic inter-nucleon potentials by a unitary transformation in a way that guarantees convergence to the exact solution as the basis size increases. I will discuss nuclear structure results for light nuclei up to A=13 obtained by using several modern nucleon-nucleon potentials, including those derived from the effective field theory. The importance of the much-less-explored three-nucleon forces for not only the binding energy but also for the excitation spectra and some observables will be highlighted.