Treatment of Continuum in Weakly Bound Systems in Structure and Reactions

We investigate different methods for the treatment of continuum states in nuclear structure calculations. We exploit a simple laboratory case: two particle moving in a one-dimensional mean field and interacting via a density-dependent short range residual interaction. We find that in procedures that involve continuum discretization a rather large basis has to be used in order to get convergence to the exact results, in particular for the radial dependence of the two-particle wave function. This may lead to unpracticable situations in the case of many interacting particles in the continuum.