Beyond mean-field study of excited states: Analysis within the Lipkin model

Beyond mean-field methods based on restoration of symmetries and configuration mixing by the generator coordinate method (GCM) enable to calculate on the same footing correlations in the ground state and the properties of excited states. Excitation energies are often largely overestimated, especially in nuclei close to magicity, even when transition probabilities are well-described. We analyse here the origin of this failure. The first part of the paper compares realistic projected GCM and QRPA calculations for selected Sn isotopes performed with the same effective Skyrme interaction. Although it is difficult to perform RPA and GCM calculations under exactly the same conditions, this comparison shows that the projected GCM overestimates the RPA results. In the second part of this paper, we compare GCM and RPA in the framework of the exactly solvable Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model. We show that the discretized GCM works quite well and permits to obtain nearly exact results with a small number of discretization points. This analysis indicates also that to break more symmetries of the nuclear Hamiltonian in the construction of the GCM basis is probably the best way to improve the description of excited states by the GCM.