Physical Society Colloquium

2004 R.E. Bell Lecture

Density-functional theory and the nuclear binding problem

George Bertsch

University of Washington

Self-consistent mean-field theory, also called density-functional theory, has been spectacularly successful in condensed matter physics and it is a challenge to nuclear physics to find a corresponding performance on calculating nuclear binding energies. In particular the highly visible magic numbers in the nuclear binding energies cause fluctuations in a smooth behavior that are difficult to reproduce by a density functional. For the first part of my talk I will discuss simple theories of the binding, their difficulties, and how their performance can be compared. It will become clear that correlation effects are needed to make a better theory, and the last part of my lecture will describe some efforts to include correlations in a systematic way.