Third minima in actinides - do they exist?

Abstract

We study the existence of third, hyperdeformed minima in a number of even-even Th, U and Pu nuclei using the Woods-Saxon microscopic-macroscopic model that very well reproduces first and second minima and fission barriers in actinides. Deep ($3÷4$ MeV) minima found previously by Ćwiok et al. are found spurious after sufficiently general shapes are included. Shallow third wells may exist in ${}^{230,232}$Th, with IIIrd barriers $\le$ 200 and 330 keV (respectively). Thus, a problem of qualitative discrepancy between microscopic-macroscopic and selfconsistent predictions is resolved. Now, an understanding of experimental results on the apparent third minima in uranium becomes an issue.

5 pages, 3 figures, 02. 03. 2012 - submitted to PRL

References in corpus (1)

• Low energy shape oscillations of negative parity in the main and shape-isomeric minima in actinides

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