Abstract
We discuss the relevant progress that has been made in the last few years on the microscopic theory of the pairing correlation in nuclei and the open problems that still must be solved in order to reach a satisfactory description and understanding of the nuclear pairing. The similarities and differences with the nuclear matter case are emphasized and described by a few illustrative examples. The comparison of calculations of different groups on the same set of nuclei, besides agreements, also shows discrepancies that remain to be clarified. The role of the many-body correlations, like screening, that go beyond the BCS scheme, is still uncertain and requires further investigation.
Highlights
Despite the pairing in nuclei was established more than fifty years ago, the underlying interaction processes that are responsible of this remarkable and important correlation are not yet understood completely
In this paper we briefly reviewed the status of the microscopic theory of nuclear pairing
To date there is no consistent theory of nuclear matter pairing, progress has been made in developing approximated methods yielding comparable results on the density dependence of the pairing gap
Summary
Despite the pairing in nuclei was established more than fifty years ago, the underlying interaction processes that are responsible of this remarkable and important correlation are not yet understood completely. A second feature is the relevance of the single particle spectrum, because the density of states at the Fermi surface plays a major role, and because the whole single particle spectrum has influence on the effective pairing interaction. Despite these uncertainties of the microscopic theory of pairing in nuclear matter, there is a commonly accepted point of view that the gap value ∆ is quite small at the normal density ρ0, much smaller than typical values of heavy atomic nuclei. In this paper we will try to summarize the recent achievements and the main open problems that hinder the development of an accurate microscopic many-body theory of the nuclear pairing
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