High quality microscopic nuclear masses of superheavy nuclei

Abstract

To synthesize new superheavy elements, the accurate prediction of nuclear masses of superheavy nuclei is essential for calculations of reaction Q values, neutron separation energies and α-decay energies, which are important for estimating beam energies, survival probabilities and also for identifications. In this work, we include existing α-decay energies of superheavy nuclei in the fitting procedure of extended Skyrme density functionals as corresponding nuclear masses are not available. Systematic α-decay energies are well reproduced with a standard deviation of 0.24 MeV. The high quality α-decay energies make it feasible for direct identification of new elements and new isotopes. The resulting binding energies in the heaviest region are surprisingly close to the inferences by AME2020. Our work should be useful for guiding experimental synthesis of new elements 119 and 120.