Relativistic Energy Density Functional Description of Shape Transition in Superheavy Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper uses relativistic energy density functionals to predict shapes, energies, and decay properties of superheavy nuclei, providing a comprehensive theoretical framework validated against experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a modern semi-empirical REDF tailored for superheavy nuclei, combining mean-field and collective models for improved predictions.

Findings

Predicted diverse shapes of superheavy nuclei including spherical, axial, and triaxial forms.

Calculated alpha-decay energies and half-lives show good agreement with experimental data.

Demonstrated the importance of collective correlations in decay property calculations.

Abstract

Relativistic energy density functionals (REDF) provide a complete and accurate, global description of nuclear structure phenomena. A modern semi-empirical functional, adjusted to the nuclear matter equation of state and to empirical masses of deformed nuclei, is applied to studies of shapes of superheavy nuclei. The theoretical framework is tested in a comparison of calculated masses, quadrupole deformations, and potential energy barriers to available data on actinide isotopes. Self-consistent mean-field calculations predict a variety of spherical, axial and triaxial shapes of long-lived superheavy nuclei, and their alpha-decay energies and half-lives are compared to data. A microscopic, REDF-based, quadrupole collective Hamiltonian model is used to study the effect of explicit treatment of collective correlations in the calculation of Q{\alpha} values and half-lives.