The shell model as a unified view of nuclear structure

The last decade has witnessed both quantitative and qualitative progress in shell-model studies, which have resulted in remarkable gains in our understanding of the structure of the nucleus. Indeed, it is now possible to diagonalize matrices in determinantal spaces of dimensionality up to ${10}^{9}$ using the Lanczos tridiagonal construction, whose formal and numerical aspects are analyzed in this review. In addition, many new approximation methods have been developed in order to overcome the dimensionality limitations. New effective nucleon-nucleon interactions have been constructed that contain both two- and three-body contributions. The former are derived from realistic potentials (i.e., potentials…