The generator coordinate method (GCM) has been a well-known method to describe nuclear collective motions. In this method, one specifies a priori the relevant collective degrees of freedom as input of the method, based on empirical and/or phenomenological assumptions. We here propose a new extension of the GCM, in which both the basis Slater determinants and weight factors are optimized according to the variational principle. Applying this method to ${}^{16}\mathrm{O}$ and ${}^{28}\mathrm{Si}$ nuclei with the Skyrme functional, we demonstrate that the optimized bases correspond to excited states along a collective path, unlike the conventional GCM which superposes only the local ground states. This implies that a collective coordinate for large amplitude collective motions is determined in a much more complex way than what has been assumed so far.

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• Nuclear structure & decays
• 20 ≤ A ≤ 38
• 6 ≤ A ≤ 19
• Nuclear density functional theory
• Nuclear many-body theory