New theoretical ideas and advancements in computer technology have created a Renaissance in microscopic nuclear structure theory. More and more nuclear-theory groups are turning to the problem of how to calculate the structure of finite nuclei microscopically, mainly in terms of extremely large model spaces. Our research group was one of the first to become involved in this renewed interest in microscopic nuclear-structure calculations, our approach being one of constructing the best possible interaction to employ in the chosen model space. This has led us to work in a large model space, in which all the nuclear particles (i.e., nucleons) are active. So far this approach has been extremely successful in describing microscopically the properties of nuclei with two to ten nucleons. We plan to extend this approach to nuclei with up to 16 nucleons or even larger. Extremely large nuclei with more than 100 nucleons, which cannot be investigated by the above approach, will be studied using a model in terms of pairs of nucleons, instead of individual nucleons.
