Excited states of ⁴He droplets

Abstract

We study low-lying excited states of ⁴He clusters up to a cluster size of 40 atoms in a variational framework. The ansatz wave function combines two- and three-body correlations, coming from a translationally invariant configuration interaction description, and Jastrow-type short-range correlation. We have previously used this scheme to determine the ground-state energies of ⁴He and ³He clusters. Here we present an extension of this ansatz wave function having a good quantum angular momentum L. The variational procedure is applied independently to the cases with L = 0,2,4, and upper bounds for the corresponding energies are thus obtained. Moreover, centroid energies for L excitations are calculated through the use of sum rules. A comparison with previous calculations is also made.