New trial wave function for the nuclear cluster structure of nuclei

Abstract

A new trial wave function is proposed for nuclear physics, in which an exact solution to the long-standing center-of-mass problem is given. In the new approach, the widths of the single-nucleon Gaussian wave packets and the widths of the relative Gaussian wave functions describing correlations of nucleons or clusters are treated as variables in the explicit intrinsic wave function of the nuclear system. As an example, this new wave function was applied to study the typical ${^{20}{\rm Ne}}$ ($\alpha$+${{^{16}}{\rm O}}$) cluster system. By removing exactly the spurious center-of-mass effect in a very simple way, the energy curve of ${^{20}{\rm Ne}}$ was obtained by the variational calculations with the width of $\alpha$ cluster, the width of ${{^{16}}{\rm O}}$ cluster, and the size parameter of the nucleus. They are considered as the three crucial variational variables in describing the ${^{20}{\rm Ne}}$ ($\alpha$+${{^{16}}{\rm O}}$) cluster system. This shows that the new wave function can be a very interesting new tool for studying many-body and cluster effects in nuclear physics.