Converging upper and lower bounds for ground-state energies of atomic nuclei

Abstract

By expanding the wave function in terms of the translationally invariant basis of harmonic oscillator functions, we calculate the converging upper (variational) bound for the energy. It is shown that one can construct lower bounds using the reduced density matrix that corresponds to the upper bound. These lower bounds converge to an exact value with the expansion of the basis. We perform the calculations of both bounds with realistic nucleon-nucleon potential for ground states of the triton and the alpha-particle.