Effective operators in nuclear-structure calculations

A brief review of the history of the use of many-body perturbation theory to determine effective operators for shell-model calculations, i.e., for calculations in truncated model spaces, is given, starting with the ground-breaking work of Arima and Horie for electromagnetic moments. The problems encountered in utilizing this approach are discussed. New methods based on unitary-transformation approaches are introduced and analyzed. The old problems persist, but the new methods allow us to obtain a better insight into the nature of the physics involved in these processes.