Spectra of open-shell nuclei with Pade-resummed degenerate perturbation theory

We apply degeneratemany-body perturbation theory at high orders for the ab initio description of ground states and excitation spectra of open-shell nuclei using soft realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions. We derive a recursive formulation of standard degenerate many-body perturbation theory that enables us to evaluate order-by-order perturbative energy and state corrections up to the 30th order. We study Li-6,Li-7 as test cases using a similarity renormalization group (SRG) evolved nucleon-nucleon interaction from chiral effective field theory. The simple perturbation series exhibits a strong, often oscillatory divergence, as was observed previously for ground states of closed-shell nuclei. Even for very soft interactions resulting from SRG evolutions up to large flow parameter, i.e., low-momentum scales, the perturbation series still diverges. However, a resummation of the perturbation series via Pade approximants yields very stable and converged ground and excited-state energies in very good agreement with exact no-core shell-model calculations for the same model space.