  We present several coupled-cluster calculations of ground and excited states
of 4He and 16O employing methods from quantum chemistry. A comparison of
coupled cluster results with the results of exact diagonalization of the
hamiltonian in the same model space and other truncated shell-model
calculations shows that the quantum chemistry inspired coupled cluster
approximations provide an excellent description of ground and excited states of
nuclei, with much less computational effort than traditional large-scale
shell-model approaches. Unless truncations are made, for nuclei like 16O,
full-fledged shell-model calculations with four or more major shells are not
possible. However, these and even larger systems can be studied with the
coupled cluster methods due to the polynomial rather than factorial scaling
inherent in standard shell-model studies. This makes the coupled cluster
approaches, developed in quantum chemistry, viable methods for describing
weakly bound systems of interest for future nuclear facilities.
