Variation of multi-Slater determinants in antisymmetrized molecular dynamics and its application to $^{10}$Be with various clustering

We propose a method to optimize the multi-Slater determinants of the antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) in the linear combination form and apply it to the neutron-rich $^{10}$Be nucleus. The individual Slater determinants and their weights in the superposition are determined simultaneously according to the variational principle of the energy of the total wave function. The multi-AMD basis states of $^{10}$Be show various cluster structures as well as the shell-model type. In the cluster configurations, different intercluster distances are superposed automatically indicating the role of the generator coordinates. We further introduce a procedure to obtain the configurations for the excited states imposing the orthogonal condition to the ground-state configurations. In the excited states of $^{10}$Be, the linear-chain-like structure is confirmed consisting of various clusters. The energy spectrum using the obtained basis states reproduces the experiments. The present framework can be the method to find the optimal multi-configuration for nuclear ground and excited states.