Further microscopic studies of the fission barriers of heavy nuclei

Abstract

Two systematic sources of error in most current microscopic evaluations of fission-barrier heights are studied. They are concerned with an approximate treatment of the Coulomb exchange terms (known as the Slater approximation) in the self-consistent mean fields and the projection on good parity states (e.g., of positive parity for the spontaneous fission of an even-even nucleus) of left-right reflection asymmetric intrinsic solutions (e.g., around the second barrier). Approximate or unprojected solutions are shown to lead each to an underestimation of the barrier heights by a few hundred keV.