The Goals of the Project

1. Development of effective energy functionals that are appropriate for the description of heavy nuclei. Our goal is to improve the existing energy density (Skyrme) functionals to develop a force that will be used in calculations of fission dynamics. To this end, we will use recently developed Hartree-Fock (HF) and Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) codes.

2. Systematic self-consistent calculations of binding energies and fission barriers of actinide and trans-actinide nuclei using modern density functionals. This will be followed by calculations of spontaneous fission lifetimes and mass and charge divisions using dynamic adiabatic approaches based on the WKB approximation.

3. Investigate novel microscopic (non-adiabatic) methods to study the fission process. In particular, we are going to assess whether the imaginary time method and the generator coordinate method can be used in practical self-consistent calculations.