Fission properties of the BCPM functional

TL;DR

This study evaluates the Fission properties of the BCPM energy density functional, demonstrating its ability to reproduce experimental fission barriers and isomer energies, while analyzing uncertainties in spontaneous fission half-life predictions across various uranium isotopes.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the BCPM functional's performance in modeling fission properties and explores the impact of pairing correlations on half-life predictions.

Findings

BCPM reproduces fission barrier heights and isomer energies well.

Spontaneous fission half-life predictions agree with experiments over 27 orders of magnitude.

Increasing pairing correlations significantly affects half-life estimates.

Abstract

We explore the properties of the Barcelona Catania Paris Madrid (BCPM) energy density functional concerning fission dynamics. Potential energy surfaces as well as collective inertias relevant in the fission process are computed for several nuclei where experimental data exists. Inner and outer barrier heights as well as fission isomer excitation energies are reproduced quite well in all the cases. The spontaneous fission half lives $t_{\textrm{\textrm{SF}}}$ are also computed using the standard semiclassical approach and the results are compared with the experimental data. A reasonable agreement with experiment is found over a range of 27 orders of magnitude but the theoretical predictions suffer from large uncertainties associated to the values of the parameters entering the spontaneous fission half life formula. The impact that increasing the pairing correlations strengths has in the spontaneous fission half lives is analyzed and found to be large in all the nuclei considered. Given the satisfactory description of the trend of fission properties with mass number we explore the fission properties of the even-even uranium isotope chain from $^{226}$U to $^{282}$U. Very large half lives are found when getting close to neutron number N=184.