Revisiting the Equation-of-Motion Method: A Universal Framework for Correlated Quantum Systems

Abstract

A general implementation of the equation-of-motion (EOM) formalism for correlated many-body states is presented and applied to the description of collective excitations in atomic nuclei. While EOM approaches are traditionally formulated on top of independent-particle reference states, the present work extends the method to correlated reference states generated by modern many-body solvers. This formulation enables a consistent treatment of ground-state correlations and excited-state dynamics within a unified framework. Particular emphasis is placed on collective nuclear excitations employing chiral nuclear Hamiltonians in an ab initio context. The approach is motivated by the renewed interest in EOM techniques across several fields, including quantum chemistry and quantum computing, where they provide efficient and systematically improvable descriptions of excitation spectra. The present results demonstrate that the EOM framework offers a flexible and powerful tool for the microscopic description of nuclear spectroscopy beyond the traditional mean-field paradigm.