Microscopic description of quadrupole-octupole coupling in actinides with the Gogny-D1M energy density functional

Abstract

Abstract The interplay between quadrupole and octupole degrees of freedom is discussed in a series of U, Pu, Cm and Cf isotopes both at the mean-field level and beyond. In addition to the static Hartree–Fock–Bogoliubov approach, dynamical beyond-mean-field correlations are taken into account via both parity restoration and symmetry-conserving generator coordinate method calculations based on the parametrization D1M of the Gogny energy density functional. Physical properties such as correlation energies, negative-parity excitation energies as well as reduced transition probabilities B(E1) and B(E3) are discussed in detail and compared with the available experimental data. It is shown that, for the studied nuclei, the quadrupole-octupole coupling is weak and to a large extent the properties of negative parity states can be reasonably well described in terms of the octupole degree of freedom alone.