Microscopic calculation of a model ¹⁶O nucleus

We present variational calculations for a hypothetical system of 16 nucleons interacting via the Malfliet-Tjon potential and compare our results with the Green-function Monte Carlo (GFMC) data of Helmbrecht et al. For a system of 16 bosons, we find that the (approximate) ground-state energy of our optimized hypernetted-chain calculation agrees with the GFMC data within 1%. For fermions, we find that the optimized Fermi hypernetted chain calculation leads to a ground state energy between the GFMC data and the variational Monte Carlo result with non-optimized correlations; the one-body density predicted by the FHNC theory agrees well with the one predicted by the GFMC calculation.