Pair-vibrational states in the presence of neutron-proton pairing

Abstract: Pair vibrations are studied for a Hamiltonian with neutron-neutron, proton-proton and neutron-proton pairing. The spectrum is found to be rich in strongly correlated, low-lying excited states. Changing theratio of diagonal to off-diagonal pairing matrix elements is found to have a large impact on the excited-state spectrum. The variational configuration interaction (VCI) method, used to calculate the excitation spectrum, is found to be in very good agreement with exact solutions for systems with large degeneracies having equal T=0 and T=1 pairing strengths.