Many-body calculations with deuteron based single-particle bases and their associated natural orbits

We use the recently introduced single-particle states obtained from localized deuteron wavefunctions as a basis for nuclear many-body calculations. We show that energies can be substantially lowered if the natural orbits (NOs) obtained from this basis are used. We use this modified basis for 10B, 16O and 24Mg employing the bare NNLOopt nucleon–nucleon interaction. The lowering of the energies increases with the mass. Although in principle NOs require a full scale preliminary many-body calculation, we found that an approximate preliminary many-body calculation, with a marginal increase in the computational cost, is sufficient. The use of natural orbits based on an harmonic oscillator basis leads to a much smaller lowering of the energies for a comparable computational cost.