We study the extension of our translationally invariant treatment of few-body nuclear systems to heavier nuclei. At the same time we also introduce state-dependent correlation operators. Our techniques are tailored to those nuclei that can be dealt with in LS coupling, which includes all nuclei up to the shell closure at A = 40. We study mainly p-shell nuclei in this paper. A detailed comparison with other microscopic many-body approaches is made, using a variety of schematic nuclear interactions. It is shown that our methodology produces very good energies, and presumably also wave functions, for medium mass nuclei.

In this paper we discuss an approach to the ab initio study of ground states of light nuclei using realistic forces. The method constructs trial variational wavefunctions by superimposing state-dependent translationally-invariant pair correlations on a state-independent Jastrow-correlated wavefunction, with very promising results.

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