Nuclear landscape in a mapped collective Hamiltonian from covariant density functional theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nuclear landscape using a covariant density functional theory with a collective Hamiltonian, highlighting the importance of dynamical correlations and triaxial deformation for accurate binding energy predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a microscopically mapped five-dimensional collective Hamiltonian within covariant density functional theory, improving the description of nuclear binding energies across the nuclear landscape.

Findings

Enhanced agreement with experimental binding energies, especially in medium and heavy nuclei.

Dynamical correlation energies significantly improve the model's accuracy.

The nuclear landscape is notably extended with the PC-PK1 functional compared to previous functionals.

Abstract

The nuclear landscape has been investigated within the triaxial relativistic Hartree-Bogoliubov theory with the PC-PK1 density functional, and the beyond-mean-field dynamical correlation energies are taken into account by a microscopically mapped five-dimensional collective Hamiltonian without additional free parameters. The effects of triaxial deformation and dynamical correlations on the nuclear landscape are analyzed. The present results provide the best description of the experimental binding energies, in particular for medium and heavy mass regions, in comparison with the results obtained previously with other state-of-the-art covariant density functionals. The inclusion of the dynamical correlation energies plays an important role in the PC-PK1 results. It is emphasized that the nuclear landscape is considerably extended by the PC-PK1 functional in comparison with the previous results with other density functionals, which may be due to the different isovector properties in the density functionals.