Probing the symmetry energy from the nuclear isoscaling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different nuclear mass formulas affect isoscaling parameters and demonstrates that including surface corrections aligns symmetry energy values with those derived from nuclear mass fits.

Contribution

It reveals that surface corrections to the symmetry energy explain discrepancies in isoscaling analyses, improving consistency with nuclear mass data.

Findings

Surface corrections broaden isotopic distributions

Symmetry energy values align with nuclear mass fits when surface effects are included

Different mass formula parameterizations influence isoscaling sensitivity

Abstract

Using different parameterizations of the nuclear mass formula, we study the sensitivity of the isoscaling parameters to the mass formula employed in grand-canonical calculations. Previous works on isoscaling have suggested that the symmetry energy implied in such calculations is anomalously smaller than that suggested by fits to nuclear masses. We show that surface corrections to the symmetry energy naturally broadens the isotopic distribution thus allowing for values of the symmetry energy which more closely match those obtained from nuclear masses.