Some New Perspectives on Pairing in Nuclei

Ever since the work of Richardson in the mid-60s1, it has been recognized that the Pairing Model (PM) is exactly solvable, even in the presence of non-degenerate single-particle levels. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the PM, with several applications reported that build on this exact solvability 2. This talk reviews two recent applications of the PM in nuclear physics. Both build on the fact that there exists a classical electrostatic analogy for every PM. One makes use of this analogy to obtain a pictorial representation of how superconductivity arises in finite nuclear systems 3. The other has led us to propose a new mechanism for sd dominance in interacting boson models of nuclei4.