A simple tool to study many-body forces
Guillaume Sicorello, Claude Semay
Abstract
The envelope theory, also known as the auxiliary field method, is a technique to compute approximate solutions of a quantum system with N identical particles. It has been generalized for various systems with arbitrary kinematics and one- or two-body potentials. The basic idea is to replace the Hamiltonian H under study by an auxiliary Hamiltonian ˜H which is solvable, the eigenvalues of H˜ being optimized to be as close as possible to those of H. The method is easy to implement since it reduces to find the solution of a transcendental equation. Recently, its accuracy has been tested for eigenvalues and eigenvectors by computing the ground state of various systems containing up to 10 bosons. We show here that the envelope theory can be extended to compute the eigensolutions of a system of identical particles with a type of many-body forces often used in phenomenological models.