Stochastic Variational Approach to Quantum-Mechanical Few-Body Problems [Hardcover]

Quantum-mechanical few-body problems.- to variational methods.- Stochastic variational method.- Other methods to solve few-body problems.- Variational trial functions.- Matrix elements for spherical Gaussians.- Small atoms and molecules.- Baryon spectroscopy.- Few-body problems in solid state physics.- Nuclear few-body systems.The quantum-mechanical few-body problem is of fundamental importance for all branches of microphysics and it has substantially broadened with the advent of modern computers. This book gives a simple, unified recipe to obtain precise solutions to virtually any few-body bound-state problem and presents its application to various problems in atomic, molecular, nuclear, subnuclear and solid state physics. The main ingredients of the methodology are a wave-function expansion in terms of correlated Gaussians and an optimization of the variational trial function by stochastic sampling. The book is written for physicists and, especially, for graduate students interested in quantum few-body physics.At this moment the only text offering a kind of universal approach to do calculations for the quantum-mechanical few-body problem.DE