Microscopic description of quadrupole-hexadecapole coupling in radium, thorium, uranium, and plutonium isotopes with the Gogny energy density functional
Rodríguez-Guzmán R. Robledo L.M.
February 2025American Physical Society
Physical Review C
2025#111Issue 2
The emergence and stability of static hexadecapole deformations as well as the impact in the development of dynamic deformation due to collective motion considering quadrupole-hexadecapole coupling are studied for a selected set of radium, thorium, uranium, and plutonium isotopes, using the Gogny Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov and generator coordinate method frameworks. Sizable hexadecapole deformations are found to play a significant role in the ground and excited states of nuclei in the neighborhood of U238. For each of the studied isotopic chains, it is shown that a region with small negative hexadecapole deformation, just below the neutron magic number N=184, remains stable once zero-point quadrupole-hexadecapole fluctuations are taken into account. A transition is predicted, with increasing mass number, from a regime in which the quadrupole and hexadecapole degrees of freedom are interwoven to a regime in which they are decoupled, accompanied by an enhanced shape coexistence in the more neutron-rich sectors of the isotopic chains. It is also shown, that quadrupole-hexadecapole configuration mixing brings a nontrivial additional correlation energy gain comparable to the quadrupole correlation energy itself.
Text of the article Перейти на текст статьи
Department of Physics, Nazarbayev University, 53 Kabanbay Batyr Ave., Astana, 010000, Kazakhstan
Center for Computational Simulation, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus Montegancedo, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, 28660, Spain
Departamento de Física Teórica and CIAFF, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, 28049, Spain
Department of Physics
Center for Computational Simulation
Departamento de Física Teórica and CIAFF
10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель
Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026