Effects of triaxiality and pairing interaction on fission barriers of actinide nuclei

Abstract

In this paper, we employ the density-dependent relativistic mean-field theory to study how the triaxiality and pairing interaction affect the inner fission barriers of actinide nuclei. It was found that the triaxiality reduced the inner barriers and improved agreement with experimental values for many actinides. However, about 1–2 MeV discrepancy to the experimental values still remained for some of the considered nuclei. Such a discrepancy could be made further smaller by increasing the BCS pairing strength parameter. In this work, we demonstrated that adjusting the paring strength was effective in reproducing the experimental inner fission barriers as well as “pairing rotational energy” and binding energy in a consistent manner for nuclei where the effect of the triaxiality on the inner barriers was significant.