Many-body factorization and position–momentum equivalence of nuclear short-range correlations

While mean-field approximations, such as the nuclear shell model, provide a good description of many bulk nuclear properties, they fail to capture the important effects of nucleon–nucleon correlations such as the short-distance and high-momentum components of the nuclear many-body wave function¹. Here, we study these components using the effective pair-based generalized contact formalism^2,3 and ab initio quantum Monte Carlo calculations of nuclei from deuteron to ⁴⁰Ca (refs. ^4–6). We observe a universal factorization of the many-body nuclear wave function at short distance into a strongly interacting pair and a weakly interacting residual system. The residual system distribution is consistent with that of an uncorrelated system, showing that short-distance correlation effects are predominantly embedded in two-body correlations. Spin- and isospin-dependent ‘nuclear contact terms’ are extracted in both coordinate and momentum space for different realistic nuclear potentials. The contact coefficient ratio between two different nuclei shows very little dependence on the nuclear interaction model. These findings thus allow extending the application of mean-field approximations to short-range correlated pair formation by showing that the relative abundance of short-range pairs in the nucleus is a long-range (that is, mean field) quantity that is insensitive to the short-distance nature of the nuclear force.