Method for solving the many-body bound state nuclear problem

We present a method based on hyperspherical harmonics to solve the nuclear many-body problem. It is an extension of accurate methods used for studying few-body systems to many bodies and is based on the assumption that nucleons in nuclei interact mainly via pairwise forces. This leads to a two-variable integro-differential equation which is easy to solve. Unlike methods that utilize effective interactions, the present one employs directly nucleon-nucleon potentials and therefore nuclear correlations are included in an unambiguous way. Three body forces can also be included in the formalism. Details on how to obtain the various ingredients entering into the equation for the A-body system are given. Employing our formalism we calculated the binding energies for closed and open shell nuclei with central forces where the bound states are defined by a single hyperspherical harmonic. The results found are in agreement with those obtained by other methods.