Abstract
Background: New superheavy nuclei are often identified through their characteristic -decay energies, which requires accurate calculations of values. While many predictions are available, little is known about their uncertainties, and this makes it difficult to carry out extrapolations to as-yet-unknown systems.
Purpose: This work aims to analyze several models, compare their predictions to available experimental data, and study their performance for the unobserved -decay chains of and , which are of current experimental interest. Our quantified results will also serve as a benchmark for future, more sophisticated statistical studies.
Methods: We use nuclear superfluid density functional theory (DFT) with several Skyrme energy density functionals (EDFs). To estimate systematic model uncertainties, we employ uniform model averaging.
Results: We evaluated the values for even-even nuclei from Fm to . For well-deformed nuclei between Fm and Ds, we find excellent consistency between different model predictions, and a good agreement with experimental results. For transitional nuclei beyond Ds, intermodel differences grow, resulting in an appreciable systematic error. In particular, our models underestimate for the heaviest nucleus .
Conclusions The robustness of DFT predictions for well-deformed superheavy nuclei supports the idea of using experimental values, together with theoretical predictions, as reasonable indicators. Unfortunately, this identification method is not expected to work well in the region of deformed-to-spherical shape transition as one approaches . The use of values in the identification of new superheavy nuclei will benefit greatly from progress in developing both new spectroscopic-quality EDFs and more sophisticated statistical techniques of uncertainty quantification.
- Received 31 October 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.99.014317
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