THE EFFECT OF PAIRING CORRELATIONS ON NUCLEAR TRANSITION RATES

Abstract

An attempt is made to study the influence of pairing correlations in some γ and β decay processes, using wave functions that are eigenfunctions of the number operator, and that have extremely large overlaps with the exact solutions of the pairing Hamiltonian. The techniques used are straight-forward, and it is not much more difficult to obtain accurate numerical results with the new wave functions than it is with the usual Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer wave functions. The results show appreciable differences between the two types of wave functions, which in some β-decay cases studied can be as much as 10% to 25% when the same single particle level structure end pairing force parameter are used. Improvement is obtained in some cases. In others, the projected wave functions indicate that pairing correlations can account for only- part of the configuration mixing required to explain the large deviations from single particle values that are experimentally observed.