Nuclear deformation at finite temperature

Abstract

Deformation, a key concept in our understanding of heavy nuclei, is based on a mean-field description that breaks the rotational invariance of the nuclear many-body Hamiltonian. We present a method to analyze nuclear deformations at finite temperature in a framework that preserves rotational invariance. The auxiliary-field Monte-Carlo method is used to generate the statistical ensemble and calculate the probability distribution associated with the quadrupole operator. Applying the technique to nuclei in the rare-earth region, we identify model-independent signatures of deformation and find that deformation effects persist to higher temperatures than the spherical-to-deformed shape phase-transition temperature of mean-field theory.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Fission Barriers of Compound Superheavy Nuclei
• Spin projection in the shell model Monte Carlo method and the spin distribution of nuclear level densities
• Heavy deformed nuclei in the shell model Monte Carlo method
• Crossover from vibrational to rotational collectivity in heavy nuclei in the shell-model Monte Carlo approach