Physics Letters B 795 (2019) 177–182
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Symmetry restoration in the mean-field description of proton-neutron
pairing
A.M. Romero
a
, J. Dobaczewski
a,b,c,∗
, A. Pastore
a
a
Department of Physics, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom
b
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, ul. Pasteura 5, PL-02-093 Warsaw, Poland
c
Helsinki Institute of Physics, P.O. Box 64, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
11 February 2019
Received
in revised form 7 May 2019
Accepted
15 June 2019
Available
online 18 June 2019
Editor:
J.-P. Blaizot
Keywords:
Mean
field
Proton-neutron
pairing
Isoscalar
pairing
Symmetry
restoration
Pair-transfer
amplitudes
SO(8)
pairing model
We show that the symmetry-restored paired mean-field states (quasiparticle vacua) properly account for
isoscalar versus isovector nuclear pairing properties. Full particle-number, spin, and isospin symmetries
are restored in a simple SO(8) proton-neutron pairing model, and prospects to implement a similar
approach in a realistic setting are delineated. Our results show that, provided all symmetries are restored,
the pictures based on pair-condensate and quartet-condensate wave functions represent equivalent ways
of looking at the physics of nuclear proton-neutron pairing.
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
A key question in nuclear structure physics is do proton-
neutron
(pn) pairs form collective condensates in nuclei in the
same way that like-particle pairs do? Ever since the existence of
like-particle nuclear pairing was suggested in 1958 by Bohr, Mot-
telson,
and Pines [1], this simple question has been addressed in
numerous studies [2]. As late as in 2004, the authors of Ref. [3]
concluded
that in spite of many attempts to extend the quasiparti-
cle
approach to incorporate the effect of pn correlations, no symmetry-
unrestricted
mean-field calculations of pn pairing, based on realistic
effective interaction and the isospin conserving formalism have been car-
ried
out. This conclusion still holds even today.
In
this Letter, we show that sometimes contradicting conclu-
sions
about the existence of the pn pair condensate may have
resulted from using a mean-field formalism without full symme-
try
restoration. Here we apply this formalism within simultane-
ous
breaking and then restoration of three major symmetries:
particle-number, angular-momentum, and isospin. In the shell-
model
framework these symmetries are not broken and hence do
not have to be restored. A number of such studies already exist,
see, e.g., Ref. [4]. However, the shell-model interprets the pn pair-
ing
as an effect of a strong nucleon-nucleon isoscalar interaction,
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
address: jacek.dobaczewski@york.ac.uk (J. Dobaczewski).
and is less concerned with the analysis of wave functions in terms
of collective condensates. In this sense, the question of existence
of the putative pn condensate remains open.
Due
to the attractive nature of the nuclear interaction, atomic
nuclei are strongly correlated systems exhibiting superfluid proper-
ties.
The theoretical description of nuclear superfluidity is directly
related to the theory of electronic superconductivity, wherein
Cooper pairs of electrons in time-reversed states condensate near
the Fermi level. In the nuclear case, we may expect a possible for-
mation
of six types of pairs, corresponding to the four degrees of
freedom of the nucleon: spin and isospin, up and down. More pre-
cisely,
we may have scalar-isovector Cooper pairs
ˆ
P
+
ν
, with three
projections of the total isospin ν ≡ T
z
=0, ±1, and vector-isoscalar
pairs
ˆ
D
+
μ
, with three projections of the total spin μ ≡ S
z
=0, ±1.
The condensation of spin-aligned
ˆ
D
+
μ
pairs has recently attracted
increased attention, see Refs. [5,6] and references cited therein.
The
most general pair condensate is represented by a quasipar-
ticle
vacuum. This can be written in terms of the Thouless state [7,
8],
which may be expressed as | = N exp{
ˆ
Z
+
}|0, for the Thou-
less
pair
ˆ
Z
+
given by
ˆ
Z
+
=
ν=0,±1
p
ν
ˆ
P
+
ν
+
μ=0,±1
d
μ
ˆ
D
+
μ
. (1)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2019.06.032
0370-2693/
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.