Microscopic description of quadrupole-hexadecapole coupling in radium, thorium, uranium, and plutonium isotopes with the Gogny energy density functional
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: 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 $^{238}\mathrm{U}$. 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.
Source: Physical Review C
Authors: R. Rodríguez-Guzmán, L. M. Robledo
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G1175115578, G121809054, G143639328, G1622782223, G1855990336, G2181301144, G2262748287, G2309174360, G2390397592, G2432759317, G2585926585, G2660406951, G279363373, G2985843109, G300979063, G3219650811, G34346518, G3480869486, G3518538256, G4063135504, G410571670, G425668148, G430777504, G451917667, G4526231891, G5080475149, G5421974903, G5539308778, G586857820, G5967599077, G7084143925, G7391727506, G7434936867, G846842501, G8920660035, G897484643, G929308097, G99296377
OpenAlex ID: W4407174176