Background: Ab initio many-body methods have been developed over the past 10 yr to address closed-shell nuclei up to mass $A\ensuremath{\approx}130$ on the basis of realistic two- and three-nucleon interactions. A current frontier relates to the extension of those many-body methods to the description of open-shell nuclei. Several routes to address open-shell nuclei are currently under investigation, including ideas that exploit spontaneous symmetry breaking.Purpose: Singly open-shell nuclei can be efficiently described via the sole breaking of U(1) gauge symmetry associated with particle-number conservation as a way to account for their superfluid character. While this route was recently followed within the framework of self-consistent Green's function theory, the goal of the present work is to formulate a similar extension within the framework of coupled cluster theory.Methods: We formulate and apply Bogoliubov coupled cluster (BCC) theory, which consists of representing the exact ground-state wave function of the system as the exponential of a quasiparticle excitation cluster operator acting on a Bogoliubov reference state. Equations for the ground-state energy and the cluster amplitudes are derived at the singles and doubles level (BCCSD) both algebraically and diagrammatically. The formalism includes three-nucleon forces at the normal-ordered two-body level. The first BCC code is implemented in
m scheme, which will permit the treatment of doubly open-shell nuclei via the further breaking of SU(2) symmetry associated with angular momentum conservation.Results: Proof-of-principle calculations in an
Nmax=6 spherical harmonic oscillator basis for
16,18O and
18Ne in the BCCD approximation are in good agreement with standard coupled cluster results with the same chiral two-nucleon interaction, while
20O and
20Mg display underbinding relative to experiment. The breaking of U(1) symmetry, monitored by computing the variance associated with the particle-number operator, is relatively constant for all five nuclei, in both the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov and BCCD approximations.Conclusions: The newly developed many-body formalism increases the potential span of ab initio calculations based on single-reference coupled cluster techniques tremendously, i.e., potentially to reach several hundred additional midmass nuclei. The new formalism offers a wealth of potential applications and further extensions dedicated to the description of ground and excited states of open-shell nuclei. Short-term goals include the implementation of three-nucleon forces at the normal-ordered two-body level. Midterm extensions include the approximate treatment of triples corrections and the development of the equation-of-motion methodology to treat both excited states and odd nuclei. Long-term extensions include exact restoration of U(1) and SU(2) symmetries.
Coupled equations for even and odd particle number correlation functions are set up via the equation of motion method. For the even particle number case this leads to self-consistent random-phase approximation equations already known from the literature. From the equations of the odd particle number case the single-particle occupation probabilities are obtained in a self-consistent way. This is the essential new procedure of this work. Both even and odd particle number cases are based on the same correlated vacuum and, thus, are coupled equations. Applications to the Lipkin model and to the one-dimensional Hubbard model give very good results.
The ground-state pairing correlations in finite fermionic systems are described with a high degree of accuracy within a variational approach based on a combined coupled-cluster and particle-number-projected BCS ansatz. The flexibility of this symmetry-preserving wave function enables a unified picture valid from weak to strong coupling, both in small and large systems. The present variational approach consistently yields an energy upper bound while operating at the same level of precision as the nonvariational particle-number-projected Bogoliubov-coupled-cluster theory [Phys. Rev. C 99, 044301 (2019)].