# Intrinsic operators for the translationally-invariant many-body problem

Published in Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, 2020

DOI: 10.1088/1361-6471/ab9d38 | arXiv: 2004.1202
Recommended citation: M. A. Caprio, A. E. McCoy, and P. J. Fasano, J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 47, 122001 (2020). (download)

The need to enforce fermionic antisymmetry in the nuclear many-body problem commonly requires use of single-particle coordinates, defined relative to some fixed origin. To obtain physical operators which nonetheless act on the nuclear many-body system in a Galilean-invariant fashion, thereby avoiding spurious center-of-mass contributions to observables, it is necessary to express these operators with respect to the translational intrinsic frame. Several commonly-encountered operators in nuclear many-body calculations, including the magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole operators (in the impulse approximation) and generators of $\mathrm{U}(3)$ and $\mathrm{Sp}(3,\mathbb{R})$ symmetry groups, are bilinear in the coordinates and momenta of the nucleons and, when expressed in intrinsic form, become two-body operators. To work with such operators in a second-quantized many-body calculation, it is necessary to relate three distinct forms: the defining intrinsic-frame expression, an explicitly two-body expression in terms of two-particle relative coordinates, and a decomposition into one-body and separable two-body parts. We establish the relations between these forms, for general (non-scalar and non-isoscalar) operators bilinear in coordinates and momenta.