A strong correlation between nuclear collectivity and atomic masses

Abstract

This work explores how nuclear collectivity arises in singly-closed shell nuclei where particle–particle correlations may be the dominant degree of freedom. The trends of values in the Ni and Sn superfluids with N⪆Z are predicted from proton and neutron pairing gaps extracted from atomic masses. Nuclear collectivity is enhanced for the combination of large and close-lying proton and neutron pairing gaps. The agreement with the Ni isotopes is excellent, and recent experimental results support the enhanced trend predicted for the neutron-deficient Sn isotopes. This work shows that many-body microscopic properties such as nuclear collectivity could be inferred directly from macroscopic average properties such as atomic masses.