Investigation of heavy nuclei with sharp seniority wave functions and comparison to the BCS approximation

Within a realistic model for heavy spherical nuclei, a numerical comparison of the results of the BCS approximation and the seniority 0 and 1 approximation is performed in a detailed way. It is shown that for the characteristic pairing properties there is a good agreement between both computational methods for this range of nuclei if one takes realistic single-particle energies and pairing matrix elements into account.