Microscopic description of quadrupole-hexadecapole coupling in radium, thorium, uranium and plutonium isotopes with the Gogny energy density functional

Bibliographic Details
Title: Microscopic description of quadrupole-hexadecapole coupling in radium, thorium, uranium and plutonium isotopes with the Gogny energy density functional
Authors: Rodriguez-Guzman, R., Robledo, L. M.
Source: Phys Rev C 111, 024304 (2025)
Publication Year: 2025
Collection: Nuclear Theory
Subject Terms: Nuclear Theory
More Details: 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 $^{238}$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.
Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures
Document Type: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.111.024304
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04985
Accession Number: edsarx.2502.04985
Database: arXiv
More Details
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevC.111.024304