- 'P. Papakonstantinou'
- 'R. Roth'
- 'N. Paar'
title: |
    Nuclear collective excitations using correlated realistic interactions:\
    the role of explicit RPA correlations
---

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Introduction {#Sintro}
============

For the description of nuclear collective excitations and especially giant resonances throughout the nuclear chart, the theory of choice is the random phase approximation (RPA) — and its various siblings: the quasi-particle RPA for open-shell nuclei, the renormalized RPA, the second-order RPA (SRPA) and of course the relativistic versions. The most primitive applications of the usual RPA — i.e., non-relativistic, first-order, for closed-shell nuclei — consist typically of a ground-state description based on the Woods-Saxon potential and a phenomenological residual particle-hole ($ph$) interaction, e.g., of Landau-Migdal type. An important development in the field has been the construction of increasingly refined energy functionals and corresponding interactions, with those of Skyrme type dominating the landscape. These have allowed what is termed “self-consistent" RPA calculations: the residual $ph$ interaction is derived from the same interaction used in the Hartree-Fock (HF) description of the ground state. Self-consistency ensures that certain important formal properties of the RPA solutions hold exactly, including the separation of spurious states and the preservation of sum rules. Moreover, physical links between 