Nuclear Saturation and Correlations

Abstract

The relation between nuclear saturation and NN-correlations is examined. Nucleons bound in a nucleus have a reduced effective mass due to the mean field. This results in off-energy-shell scatterings modifying the free-space NN-interaction by a dispersion correction. This is a major contribution to the density-dependence of the effective in-medium force and to saturation. Low-momentum effective interactions have been derived by renormalisation methods whereby correlations may be reduced by effectively cutting off high momentum components of the interaction. The effect of these cut-offs on dispersive corrections and on saturation is the main focus of this paper. The role of the tensor-force, its strength and its effect on correlations is of particular interest. The importance of the definition of the mean field in determining saturation as well as compressibility is also pointed out. With a cut-off below $\sim 2.6 fm^{-1}$ there is no saturation but at lower density the binding energy is still well approximated suggesting that such a force may be useful in nuclear structure calculations of (small) finite nuclei if saturation is not an issue. A separable interaction that fits experimental phase-shifts exactly by inverse scattering methods is used. Recent experiments measure short ranged correlations (SRC's) to be 0.23 for $^{56}Fe$. Other experiments have obtained a depletion of occupation-numbers in $^{208}Pb$ to be $\sim 0.2$. For nuclear matter with the separable interaction and a continuous spectrum we obtain the related quantity $\kappa$ to be 0.175 with the Bonn-B deuteron parameters, while Machleidt's gets $\kappa= 0.125$ for the Bonn-B potential and a continuous spectrum.