Shell energy in the heaviest nuclei using the Green’s function oscillator expansion method

Abstract

The Green’s function oscillator expansion method and the generalized Strutinsky smoothing procedure are applied to shell corrections in the heaviest elements. A macroscopic-microscopic method with a finite deformed Woods-Saxon potential is used. The stability condition for the shell correction is discussed in detail and the parameters defining the smoothing procedure are carefully determined. It is demonstrated that the spurious contribution to the total binding energy due to the unphysical particle gas that appears in the standard method can be as large as 1.5 MeV for weakly bound neutron-rich superheavy nuclei, but the effect on energy differences (e.g., alpha-decay values) is fairly small.