Nuclear few-body systems

Abstract

The stochastic variational method was originally developed to solve few-body problems in nuclear physics. In this chapter we collect a few possible applications of the SVM for nuclear systems. The nuclear force, due to the effect of the underlying quark structure and relativistic motion, is a very complicated interaction. In addition to the spinisospin dependent central part, the two-nucleon interaction contains spin-orbit and tensor forces, and L ²- and (LS)²-dependent terms. The two-body interaction designed to fit the nucleon-nucleon phase shift and the properties of the deuteron fails to reproduce the binding energies of the three- and four-nucleon nuclei, and a three-body interaction has to be introduced to get the correct binding energy. As the nucleons are not structureless point-like entities, the spatial part of the nuclear force contains a strong repulsion at short distances. These circumstances altogether make the solution of the nuclear few-body problem a formidable task.