An improved nuclear mass formula: WS3

TL;DR

This paper presents an improved global nuclear mass formula combining macroscopic-microscopic methods, Skyrme energy-density functional, and isospin symmetry, achieving high accuracy and predictive power for nuclear masses and decay energies.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new nuclear mass formula with significantly reduced deviations and demonstrates the effectiveness of the radial basis function approach for further improvements.

Findings

RMS deviation for known nuclear masses is 336 keV.

RMS deviations for neutron separation and alpha-decay energies are 286 keV and 248 keV.

The model shows excellent predictive power for new experimental data.

Abstract

We introduce a global nuclear mass formula which is based on the macroscopic-microscopic method, the Skyrme energy-density functional and the isospin symmetry in nuclear physics. The rms deviation with respect to 2149 known nuclear masses falls to 336 keV, and the rms deviations from 1988 neutron separation energies and \alpha-decay energies of 46 super-heavy nuclei are significantly reduced to 286 and 248 keV, respectively. The predictive power of the mass formula for describing new measured masses in GSI and those in AME2011 is excellent. In addition, we introduce an efficient and powerful systematic method, radial basis function approach, for further improving the accuracy and predictive power of global nuclear mass models.