Approximate Reduction of the Many-Body Problem for Strongly Interacting Particles to a Problem of Self-Consistent Fields

It is shown for systems of strongly interacting particles that in the limit of very many particles a transformation exists leading to an alternative problem which can be solved by a self-consistent field method. The transformed wave function describes "particles" moving in a collectively determined uniform potential; the transformation relating the transformed and original wave functions determines the amount of incoherence and correlation in the original function. The method appears to be more useful for fermion systems and is illustrated by applications to some aspects of nuclear structure.