Microscopic Description of Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

In recent years, microscopic cluster models have been applied successfully in studying light nuclear systems. These approaches are performed through many-body wave functions having well-defined quantum numbers and fulfilling the Pauli principle exactly. While the model is in principle an exact solution to the many-body problem, practical applications are restricted to the consideration of a model space spanned by a few cluster wave functions, accounting for the fact that in light nuclei, nucleons have the tendency to group in clusters. Keeping the internal degrees of freedom of these clusters fixed, the many-body problem is reduced to determining the relative motion between the various clusters. Detailed reviews on microscopic nuclear cluster models can be found in [4.1–3]. More recently, these models have also been successfully applied to light hypernuclei [4.4,5] as well as to light hadronic systems within non-relativistic quark models [4.6–8] (see also Chapt. 10).