Nucleon Correlations in Nuclei

In recent years there has been growing interest in the nucleon-nucleon correl­ ations inside nuclei. In many respects the motions of the nucleons can be very well described by an overall mean field, so that the motion of each nucleon is governed by the mean field due to all the other nucleons. This concept underlies the Fermi-gas, Hartree-Fock and shell models and has enabled a range of nuclear properties to be calculated, often to surprising accuracy. It gradually became clear, however, that these mean-field models are limited by the effects due to the very strong interactions between the nucleons that occur at short distances; these are the short-range correlations. They are responsible for instance for the high-momentum components in the nucleon momentum dis­ tribution, and prevent the simultaneous description of the nuclear density and momentum distributions by the same mean field. It thus becomes necessary to develop methods for including the effects of nucleon correlations in nuclei, and these are the main subject of this book. Some related problems of nuclear structure were discussed in an earlier book by the same authors: Nucleon Momentum and Density Distributions in Nuclei (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988). The main aim of that book was to study the effects of nucleon-nucleon correlations, both short-range and tensor, on the nucleon momentum distribution, which is particularly sensitive to these correl­ ations, and on the nucleon density distribution.