Thouless-Valatin rotational moment of inertia from linear response theory

Abstract

Spontaneous breaking of continuous symmetries of a nuclear many-body system results in appearance of zero-energy restoration modes. Such modes introduce a non-physical contributions to the physical excitations called spurious Nambu-Goldstone modes. Since they represent a special case of collective motion, they are sources of important information about the Thouless-Valatin inertia. The main purpose of this work is to study the Thouless-Valatin rotational moment of inertia as extracted from the Nambu-Goldstone restoration mode that results from the zero-frequency response to the total angular momentum operator. We examine the role and effects of the pairing correlations on the rotational characteristics of heavy deformed nuclei in order to extend our understanding of superfluidity in general. We use the finite amplitude method of the quasiparticle random phase approximation on top of the Skyrme energy density functional framework with the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory. We have successfully extended this formalism and established a practical method for extracting the Thouless-Valatin rotational moment of inertia from the strength function calculated in the symmetry restoration regime. Our results reveal the relation between the pairing correlations and the moment of inertia of axially deformed nuclei of rare-earth and actinide regions of the nuclear chart. We have also demonstrated the feasibility of the method for obtaining the moment of inertia for collective Hamiltonian models. We conclude that from the numerical and theoretical perspective, the finite amplitude method can be widely used to effectively study rotational properties of deformed nuclei within modern density functional approaches.