Microscopic Description of Nuclear Fission: Fission Barrier Heights of Even-Even Actinides

TL;DR

This paper assesses the accuracy of modern nuclear energy density functionals in predicting fission barrier heights and energies of isomers in even-even actinides, finding good agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It provides a systematic evaluation of nuclear energy density functionals for fission barrier predictions in actinides, highlighting their quantitative accuracy.

Findings

Self-consistent HFB theory accurately predicts isomer energies.

Outer barrier heights are well reproduced by the models.

Modern functionals show promising agreement with empirical data.

Abstract

We evaluate the performance of modern nuclear energy density functionals for predicting inner and outer fission barrier heights and energies of fission isomers of even-even actinides. For isomer energies and outer barrier heights, we find that the self-consistent theory at the HFB level is capable of providing quantitative agreement with empirical data.