Nuclear Structure Models Based on Relativistic Energy Density Functionals

Abstract

Relativistic energy density functionals provide an accurate global description of nuclear ground states and collective excitations. Guided by the medium dependence of microscopic nucleon self-energies in nuclear matter, semi-empirical functionals have been adjusted to the nuclear matter equation of state and to bulk properties of finite nuclei, and applied to studies of arbitrarily heavy nuclei, exotic nuclei far from stability, and even systems at the nucleon drip-lines. Based on this framework, structure models have been developed that go beyond the mean-field approximation and include collective correlations related to restoration of broken symmetries and fluctuations of collective variables. These models have become standard tools for nuclear structure calculations, able to describe and explain a wealth of new data from radioactive-beam facilities, the exciting phenomenology of nuclear astrophysics, and provide microscopic predictions for low-energy nuclear phenomena.