Spontaneous fission half-life in Fm isotopes with nuclear energy density functional

TL;DR

This paper develops a microscopic method combining CHFB and LQRPA to accurately evaluate the collective inertia and predict spontaneous fission half-lives of Fm isotopes, highlighting the importance of dynamical residual effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel CHFB + LQRPA approach to include dynamical residual effects in collective inertia calculations for fission, improving half-life estimations.

Findings

LQRPA inertia is significantly larger than cranking inertia.

Inertia varies notably along the fission path.

Large differences in half-life estimates highlight the importance of residual effects.

Abstract

A microscopic description of fission dynamics is important to understand the decay properties of neutron-rich heavy nuclei that are relevant to $r$-process nucleosynthesis. To provide a reliable and efficient method to evaluate the spontaneous fission half-life, we develop a method, called the constrained Hartree--Fock--Bogoliubov (CHFB) plus local quasiparticle random-phase approximation (LQRPA), to include dynamical residual effects in the collective inertia. With the CHFB + LQRPA, we evaluate the collective potential and the collective inertia along a mass-symmetric fission path in Fm isotopes with the neutron numbers $N=158$--164. The obtained LQRPA inertia is much larger than the cranking one that ignores dynamical residual effects and shows a remarkable variation along the fission path. We estimate the fission half-life of the Fm isotopes using the action integral with the obtained collective potential and inertia. A large difference between the fission half-lives obtained with the LQRPA inertia and with the cranking inertia is observed. This indicates the importance of evaluating the collective inertia for estimating the fission half-life.