We investigate the effects of the single-particle potential insertions in the effective interaction by comparing energy spectra obtained from different treatments of these insertions as a function of the size of the no-core model space. The Brueckner reaction matrix used in the first calculation includes the single-particle insertions in ladder diagrams to all orders, while the Brueckner reaction matrix used in the second calculation only keeps the single-particle potential term in the lowest-order ladder diagram. The two calculations yield almost identical ground-state energies and low-lying excitation spectra for ${}_{}{}^4{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{He}$ and ${}_{}{}^6{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{Li}$ for large enough no-core model spaces, indicating that the effects of the single-particle potential insertions in second- and higher-order ladder diagrams are small. We explain the reason for the diminishing role of these insertions with increasing size of the model space. We also show that, through a standard method of instilling a single center-of-mass wave function into all low-lying states, the spurious center-of-mass kinetic-energy term shifts the energies of all the low-lying states by nearly a constant and, therefore, has little effect on the excitation spectrum.

• Received 18 June 1993

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.48.1765