Inclusion of fluctuations in nuclear dynamics

In this letter we present a new method to include fluctuations into dynamical simulations of the Nordheim type, in which individual nucleons moving in their self-consistent mean field experience Pauli-blocked two-body collisions. The method consists of including a suitably scaled amount of noise in the basic two-body scattering process. The method is illustrated for a gas of fermions on a two-dimensional torus and the results exhibit the desired behavior: the mean phase-space occupancy relaxes towards the appropriate Fermi-Dirac distribution, the associated variance evolves as expected from quantum statistics, and the covariance reflects the various correlations inherent in the two-body collision process.