  We propose a new variational method for treating short-range repulsion of
bare nuclear force for nuclei in antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD). In
AMD, the short-range correlation is described in terms of large imaginary
centroids of Gaussian wave packets of nucleon pairs in opposite signs, causing
high-momentum components in nucleon pair. We superpose these AMD basis states
and name this method "high-momentum AMD" (HM-AMD), which is capable of
describing strong tensor correlation (Prog. Theor. Exp. Phys. (2017) 111D01).
In this paper, we extend HM-AMD by including up to two kinds of nucleon pairs
in each AMD basis state utilizing the cluster expansion, which produces
many-body correlations involving high-momentum components. We investigate how
much HM-AMD describes the short-range correlation by showing the results for
$^3$H using the Argonne V4$^\prime$ central potential. It is found that HM-AMD
reproduces the results of few-body calculations and also the tensor-optimized
AMD. This means that HM-AMD is a powerful approach to describe the short-range
correlation in nuclei. In HM-AMD, momentum directions of nucleon pairs
isotropically contribute to the short-range correlation, which is different
from the tensor correlation.
