⁴²Ca and ⁵⁰Ca with the (Many- and Few-Body) Unified Method

A new method unifying many and few-body aspects of nuclear structure has recently been introduced (Hove et al. in J Phys G Nucl Part Phys 45:073001, 2018). This method combines the many-body description of a core and the few-body structure of this core surrounded by two valence nucleons. For this reason this method is expected to work specially well when applied to nuclei close to the driplines, where the few-body halo structure with one or more nucleons outside the core is established. In this work we apply the new method to nuclei close to the valley of stability, with ⁴²Ca and ⁵⁰Ca as illustrations. We compare the results from uncorrelated mean-field calculations with the ones obtained with the unified method allowing arbitrary correlations in the valence space. We find that the unified method provides results rather similar, although distinguishable, to the Hartree–Fock calculations. The correlations are much less pronounced than at the driplines, which initially were targets for the unified method. The halo structure is not artificially maintained, but the correlations are here demonstrated to be applicable to well-bound nuclei. Excited states built on valence degrees of freedom are calculated for the same nuclei. (author)