Translationally invariant treatment of pair correlations in nuclei: I. Spin and isospin dependent correlations

We study the extension of our translationally invariant treatment of few-body nuclear systems to heavier nuclei. At the same time we also introduce state-dependent correlation operators. Our techniques are tailored to those nuclei that can be dealt with in LS coupling, which includes all nuclei up to the shell closure at A = 40. We study mainly p-shell nuclei in this paper. A detailed comparison with other microscopic many-body approaches is made, using a variety of schematic nuclear interactions. It is shown that our methodology produces very good energies, and presumably also wave functions, for medium mass nuclei.