Study Edition

Quantum many-body theory as a discipline in its own right dates largely from the 1950's. It has developed since then to its current position as one of the cornerstones of modern theoretical physics. The field remains vibrant and active, vigorous and exciting. Its most powerful techniques are truly universal. They are constantly expanding to find new fields of application, while advances continue to be made in the more traditional areas.

The recent rapid innovations in supercomputer technology are changing the concepts of numerical calculations employed in solving a wide variety of nuclear many-body problems. The purpose of the XVII RCNP International Symposium on Innovative Computational Methods in Nuclear Many-Body Problems (INNOCOM97) was to discuss the frontiers of various computational methods and to exchange ideas in wide fields of nuclear physics. The subjects discussed at the symposium covered almost all the areas of nuclear physics.

Quantum many-body theory as a discipline in its own right dates largely from the 1950's. It has developed since then to its current position as one of the cornerstones of modern theoretical physics. The field remains vibrant and active, vigorous and exciting. Its most powerful techniques are truly universal. They are constantly expanding to find new fields of application, while advances continue to be made in the more traditional areas. To commemorate the impending 80th birthdays of its two co-inventors, Firtz Coester and Hermann Kümmel, one such technique, namely the coupled cluster method, was especially highlighted at this meeting, the eleventh in the series of International Conferences on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories. The history of the coupled cluster method as told here mirrors in many ways both the development of the entire discipline of microscopic quantum many-body theory and the history of the series of conferences. The series itself is universally recognised as being the premier series of meetings in this subject area. Its proceedings have always summarised the current state of the art through the lectures of its leading practitioners. The present volume is no exception. No serious researcher in quantum many-body theory or in any field which uses it can afford to be without this volume.

This inaugural volume in a new series on quantum many-body theory contains the papers presented at the Ninth International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories. The conference focused on the development and refinement of many-body methods. A major aim was to foster the exchange of ideas among physicists working in such diverse areas as nuclear physics, quantum chemistry, complex systems, lattice Hamiltonians, quantum fluids and condensed matter physics. A special feature was a session devoted to theories for many-electron systems in low-dimensional quantum dots, wires and electrons.

The present volume contains the texts of the invited talks delivered at the Sev enth International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories held at the University of Minnesota during the period August 26-31, 1991. The proceedings of the Fourth Conference (Oulu, Finland, 1987) and Fifth Conference (Arad, Israel, 1989) have been published by Plenum as the first two volumes of this series. Papers from the First Conference (Trieste, 1978) comprise Nuclear Physics volume A328, Nos. 1, 2. The Second Conference (Oaxtepec, Mexico, 1989) was published by Springer-Verlag as volume 142 of "Lecture Notes in Physics," entitled "Recent Progress in Many Body Theories." Volume 198 of the same series contains the papers from the Third Conference (Altenberg, Germany, 1983). These volumes are intended to cover a broad spectrum of current research topics in physics that benefit from the application of many-body theories for their elucidation. At the same time there is a focus on the development and refinement of many-body methods. One of the major aims of the conference series has been to foster the ex change of ideas among physicists working in such diverse areas as nucleon-nucleon in teractions, nuclear physics, astronomy, atomic and molecular physics, quantum chem istry, quantum fluids, and condensed matter physics. The present volume contains contributions from all of these areas.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of some key developments in the understanding of the nucleon-nucleon interaction and nuclear many-body theory. The main problems at the level of meson exchange physics have been solved, and we have an effective field theory using a phenomenological interaction pioneered by Achim Schwenk and Scott Bogner, which is nearly universally accepted as a unique low-momentum interaction that includes all experimental data to date.This understanding is based on a multi-step development in which different scientific insights and a wide range of physical and mathematical methodologies fed into each other. It is best appreciated by looking at the different 'steps along the way', starting with the pioneering work of Brueckner and his collaborators that was just as necessary and important as the insightful masterly improvements to Brueckner's theory by Hans Bethe and his students. Moving on from there, the off-shell effects that bedeviled Bethe's work — which had resulted in the 1963 Reference Spectrum Method — were treated relatively accurately by introducing an energy gap between initial bound states and an intermediate state. With their influential 1967 paper, Brown and Kuo prepared the effective field theory. Later, the introduction of 'Brown-Rho scaling' deepened understanding of saturation in the many-body system and fed directly into recent work on carbon-14 dating.