Translationally invariant treatment of pair correlations in nuclei II. Tensor correlations

We study the extension of our translationally invariant correlated-cluster treatment of few-body nuclear systems to include tensor forces and correlations. It is shown that a direct application of our method is not as successful for realistic V6 interactions as our previous results for V4 potentials suggested. We investigate the cause in detail for the case of 4He, and show that a combination of the method of translationally invariant configuration interactions truncated at second order with that of Jastrow-correlated wave functions seems to be a lot more powerful, thereby suggesting that for mildly to strongly repulsive forces such a hybrid procedure may be an appropriate description. (c) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.