Dominant nucleon-pair configurations in low-lying states of deformed nuclei

In this paper we explicitly study dominant nucleon-pair configurations in low-lying states of deformed nuclei in two cases; the first is the schematic Elliott's SU(3) model with valence nucleons in the $pf$ shell, and the second is the effective V_low-k interaction with valence protons in the 50-82 shell and valence neutrons in the 82-126 shell, exemplified by ¹⁴⁶Ba and ¹⁴⁸Ce. We find that the $SD$ nucleon-pair configurations are more predominant in low-lying states of these deformed nuclei than expected. Mixings of nucleon-pair configurations beyond the conventional $SD$-pair subspace, in particular, one-G and/or one-I nucleon-pair configurations, albeit small, are found to be necessary to reproduce the moment of inertia.