Hypervirial approach to calculating expectation values of the many-body Hamiltonian.

Abstract

We present a new method, based on the hypervirial operator, for calculating expectation values of many-body Hamiltonians for local velocity-independent potentials. Our approach enables us to calculate the contributions of different components of an interaction [e.g., tensor, one pion exchange part (OPEP)] to the binding energy when {ital all} components are acting. In particular, using the integro-differential equation approach we investigate the contributions of different components of realistic nucleon-nucleon potentials to the triton and {alpha} particle ground-state binding energies. Although the tensor force contributes the most to the expectation value of the potential energy, we find that its overall contribution to the binding energy is much reduced by its large contribution to the expectation value of the kinetic energy.