Study of bound and scattering states of few-nucleon systems with correlated basis functions

The wave functions of the three- and four-nucleon systems have been expanded on a set of correlated functions given by the product of a correlation factor with the functions of the hyperspherical harmonic basis. The correlation factor includes only pair correlation functions and, in the case of a bound state, the optimal dependence of the wave fuction on the hyperradius is determined by means of a variational technique. The correlated expansion allows for treating hard-core interactions too and it is suitable also for calculations on scattering states. The results obtained for the ground states of the triton and the alpha particle are in close agreement with those from other methods. 19 refs., 1 fig., 2 tabs