Relativistic Ab-Initio Approach for Nuclear Structure

Because of the complexity and strong nature of the residual nuclear interaction and the important role of many-body correlations, atomic nuclei provide an ideal environment to study many-body methods. Models like density functional theory (DFT) provide a good description of bulk nuclear properties. These models use an effective nuclear interaction that is fitted to certain nuclei and includes, in an implicit way, the modifications it receives from being in a correlated medium. These interactions, however, are divorced from more realistic free space or bare nucleon-nucleon interactions that are based upon nucleon-nucleon scattering data. We propose a relativistic equation of motion method to link the bare nuclear interaction to the many-body system of medium mass nuclei. This approach includes (i) the effects of correlated nucleonic pairs, which are phonons, coupled to the nucleons in the interacting medium, known as the particle-vibration coupling (PVC), and (ii) an important correction eliminating basis artefacts of the confining potential. Past efforts on the PVC have been successful but have relied on the nucleon-nucleon interaction derived from an effective theory such as the (covariant) DFT. We use a bare nucleon-nucleon interaction that describes nucleon scattering properties accurately, known as the Bonn potential. With the nucleonic self-energy derived from the Bonn interaction, we bridge the gap between bare nuclear forces acting among free nucleons and the properties of finite nuclei.