Covariant density functional theory beyond mean field and applications for nuclei far from stability

Density functional theory provides a very powerful tool for a unified microscopic description of nuclei all over the periodic table. It is not only successful in reproducing bulk properties of nuclear ground states such as binding energies, radii, or deformation parameters, but it also allows the investigation of collective phenomena, such as giant resonances and rotational excitations. However, it is based on the mean field concept and therefore it has its limits. We discuss here two methods based based on covariant density functional theory going beyond the mean field concept, (i) models with an energy dependent self energy allowing the coupling to complex configurations and a quantitative description of the width of giant resonances and (ii) methods of configuration mixing between Slater determinants with different deformation and orientation providing are very successful description of transitional nuclei and quantum phase transitions.