Potential energy surfaces of actinide and transfermium nuclei from multi-dimensional constraint covariant density functional theories

TL;DR

This paper explores multi-dimensional covariant density functional theories to analyze potential energy surfaces of actinide and transfermium nuclei, revealing the significance of triaxiality and non-axial shapes in nuclear deformation and fission barriers.

Contribution

It applies advanced multi-dimensional covariant density functional theories to study complex nuclear shapes and deformation effects in actinide and transfermium nuclei, including non-axial and octupole deformations.

Findings

Triaxiality influences second fission barriers.

Non-axial 2 shape is present in some transfermium nuclei.

Deformation space includes multiple shape degrees of freedom.

Abstract

Multi-dimensional constrained covariant density functional theories were developed recently. In these theories, all shape degrees of freedom \beta_{\lambda\mu} deformations with even \mu are allowed, e.g., \beta_{20}, \beta_{22}, \beta_{30}, \beta_{32}, \beta_{40}, \beta_{42}, \beta_{44}, and so on and the CDFT functional can be one of the following four forms: the meson exchange or point-coupling nucleon interactions combined with the non-linear or density-dependent couplings. In this contribution, some applications of these theories are presented. The potential energy surfaces of actinide nuclei in the (\beta_{20}, \beta_{22}, \beta_{30}) deformation space are investigated. It is found that besides the octupole deformation, the triaxiality also plays an important role upon the second fission barriers. The non-axial reflection-asymmetric \beta_{32} shape in some transfermium nuclei with N = 150, namely 246Cm, 248Cf, 250Fm, and 252No are studied.