Adiabatic fission barriers in superheavy nuclei

TL;DR

This study calculates static fission barriers for 1305 superheavy nuclei using a microscopic-macroscopic model, revealing the significant impact of non-axiality and mass asymmetry on fission barriers, with results compared to other models and experiments.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive calculation of fission barriers for a large set of superheavy nuclei, incorporating effects of triaxiality, mass asymmetry, and pairing, using an advanced five-dimensional deformation grid.

Findings

Non-axiallity significantly alters first and second fission barriers.

Mass asymmetry effects are prominent at less deformed saddles in superheavy nuclei.

Comparison shows consistency and differences with other theoretical and experimental data.

Abstract

Using the microscopic-macroscopic model based on the deformed Woods-Saxon single-particle potential and the Yukawa-plus-exponential macroscopic energy we calculated static fission barriers $B_{f}$ for 1305 heavy and superheavy nuclei $98\leq Z \leq 126$, including even - even, odd - even, even - odd and odd - odd systems. For odd and odd-odd nuclei, adiabatic potential energy surfaces were calculated by a minimization over configurations with one blocked neutron or/and proton on a level from the 10-th below to the 10-th above the Fermi level. The parameters of the model that have been fixed previously by a fit to masses of even-even heavy nuclei were kept unchanged. A search for saddle points has been performed by the "Imaginary Water Flow" method on a basic five-dimensional deformation grid, including triaxiality. Two auxiliary grids were used for checking the effects of the mass asymmetry and hexadecapole non-axiallity. The ground states were found by energy minimization over configurations and deformations. We find that the non-axiallity significantly changes first and second fission barrier in many nuclei. The effect of the mass - asymmetry, known to lower the second, very deformed barriers in actinides, in the heaviest nuclei appears at the less deformed saddles in more than 100 nuclei. It happens for those saddles in which the triaxiallity does not play any role, what suggests a decoupling between effects of the mass-asymmetry and triaxiality. We studied also the influence of the pairing interaction strength on the staggering of $B_f$ for odd- and even-particle numbers. Finally, we provide a comparison of our results with other theoretical fission barrier evaluations and with available experimental estimates.