Abstract
The need for nuclear data far from the valley of stability, for applications such as nuclear astrophysics or future nuclear facilities, challenges the robustness as well as the predictive power of present nuclear models. Most of the nuclear data evaluation and prediction are still performed on the basis of phenomenological nuclear models. For the last decades, important progress has been achieved in fundamental nuclear physics, making it now feasible to use more reliable, but also more complex microscopic or semi-microscopic models in the evaluation and prediction of nuclear data for practical applications. Nowadays mean-field models can be tuned at the same level of accuracy as the phenomenological models, renormalized on experimental data if needed, and therefore can replace the phenomenological inputs in the evaluation of nuclear data. The latest achievements to determine nuclear masses within the non-relativistic HFB approach, including the related uncertainties in the model predictions, are discussed. Similarly, recent efforts to determine fission observables within the mean-field approach are described and compared with more traditional existing models.
Highlights
Among the various fields in nuclear astrophysics, nucleosynthesis is clearly the one the most closely related to nuclear physics, the nuclear physics imprint being found in the origin of almost all nuclides produced in the Universe [1]
Decompressed matter from binary neutron star (NS) mergers remains a viable and robust site for the r-process. This robustness, which is compatible with the unique, solar-like abundance pattern of the elements heavier than Ba observed in metalpoor stars, supports the possible creation of these elements by fission recycling in NS merger ejecta
The estimated abundance distribution remains rather sensitive to the adopted nuclear models
Summary
Among the various fields in nuclear astrophysics, nucleosynthesis is clearly the one the most closely related to nuclear physics, the nuclear physics imprint being found in the origin of almost all nuclides produced in the Universe [1]. With such a neutron richness, heavy fissioning nuclei can be produced Thanks to this property, the final composition of the ejecta is rather insensitive to details of the initial abundances and the astrophysical conditions, in particular the mass ratio of the two NSs, the quantity of matter ejected, and the equation of state [7]. All rates are based on experimental information whenever available, but since only a extremely small amount of data are known experimentally, theoretical models are fundamental in providing the various predictions For such applications, the necessary ingredients (properties of cold and hot nuclei, nuclear level densities, optical potentials, γ -ray strength functions, fission properties, β-strength functions) should ideally be derived from global, universal and microscopic models. Our capacity to predict two fundamental nuclear ingredients, namely nuclear masses and fission barriers, are discussed in the present paper in Sects. 2 and 3, respectively, and the need to improve global, universal and microscopic models emphasized
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