We present calculations of nuclear level densities that are based upon the detailed microphysics of the interacting shell model yet are also computationally tractable. To do this, we combine in a novel fashion several previously disparate ideas from statistical spectroscopy, namely partitioning of the model space into subspaces, analytic calculations of moments up to fourth order directly from the two-body interaction, and Zuker's binomial distribution. We get excellent agreement with full scale interacting shell model calculations. We also calculate ``ab initio'' the level densities for $^{ 29}$Si and $^{ 57}$Co and get reasonable agreement with experiment.
Categories: nucl-th astro-ph