NUCLEAR ENERGY DENSITY FUNCTIONALS: MEAN-FIELD AND BEYOND

Energy density functionals (EDF) have become a standard tool in nuclear structure calculations, providing an accurate global description of ground states and collective excitations. Guided by the microscopic models for the medium dependence of nucleon self-energies in nuclear matter, semi-empirical functionals have been adjusted to the nuclear matter equation of state and to bulk properties of finite nuclei, and applied to studies of arbitrarily heavy nuclei, exotic nuclei far from stability, and even systems at the nucleon drip-lines. EDF-based structure models have also been developed that go beyond the static mean-field approximation, and include collective correlations related to the restoration of broken symmetries and to fluctuations of collective variables.