Pairing correlations and symmetries in odd-A nuclei.

Abstract

The pairing correlations in odd-A nuclei are analyzed in the mean field approximation and beyond. In particular the role of symmetry conservation is investigated. We find that particle number projection after the variation (PN-PAV) has little effect on the pairing correlations specially in the weak pairing regime. This is in contrast to the variation after particle number projection (PN-VAP) approach where a strong effect is found. The situation is specially critical in odd nuclei because the pairing correlations vanish due to the blocking effect and the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov wave function collapses to the Hartree-Fock one. The PN-VAP, however, handles perfectly the exact blocking providing highly correlated wave functions. The role of the angular momentum projection is studied only in the PAV approach. We find small changes of the pairing correlation, at least at small angular momentum. In the calculations we use the Gogny interaction well suited to this kind of studies.