  Nuclear interactions evolved via renormalization group methods to lower
resolution become increasingly non-local (off-diagonal in coordinate space) as
they are softened. This inhibits both the development of intuition about the
interactions and their use with some methods for solving the quantum many-body
problem. By applying "local projections", a softened interaction can be reduced
to a local effective interaction plus a non-local residual interaction. At the
two-body level, a local projection after similarity renormalization group (SRG)
evolution manifests the elimination of short-range repulsive cores and the flow
toward universal low-momentum interactions. The SRG residual interaction is
found to be relatively weak at low energy, which motivates a perturbative
treatment.
