Fission-barriers and energy spectra of odd-mass actinide nuclei in self-consistent mean-field calculations

While there have been numerous microscopic calculations on fission barriers of even-even compoundnuclei, there are however, relatively few such work dedicated to odd-mass nuclei. This is dueto the complications posed by the breaking of the time-reversal symmetry at the mean-field leveldue to the presence of an unpaired nucleon. In order to circumvent this difficulty, previous fission barriercalculations of odd-mass nuclei have been performed by neglecting the effect of time-reversalsymmetry breaking. This work aims to improve on the description of fission barriers as well asthe spectroscopic properties of ground and fission-isomeric state, of some odd-mass actinide nucleiby taking the effect of time-reversal symmetry breaking into account. This has been perfomedwithin a Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-plus-BCS framework with blocking, where the BCS formalism hasbeen adapted to accomodate this symmetry breaking. The Skyrme nucleon-nucleon effective forcehas been used with various sets of parameters (SIII, SkM*, SLy5*). The residual pairing interactionhas been approximated by seniority forces whose neutron and proton parameters have beenfitted to reproduce the odd-even mass differences of some actinide nuclei. The low-lying rotationalband-head energies evaluated within the Bohr-Mottelson unified model have been determined forfour well-deformed odd-nuclei (235U, 239Pu, 237Np, 241Am) yielding a good qualitative agreementto the data for odd-neutron nuclei. The agreement was significantly less good for the odd-protonnuclei, possibly due to the use of the Slater approximation for the exchange Coulomb interaction.The deformation energies of two odd-neutron nuclei (235U and 239Pu) have been calculated forsome single-particle configurations up to a point beyond the outer fission-barrier. Axial symmetrynuclear shape has been assumed while a breaking of the left-right (or intrinsic parity) symmetryhas been allowed around the outer fission-barrier. The fission-barrier heights of such odd-neutronnuclei depend significantly on the particle configurations. A special attention has been paid tothe very important rotational correction to deformation energies. In particular, the correction ofthe moment of inertia calculated from the usual Belyaev expression was considered. Overall, aqualitative agreement with available data on fission-barrier heights for the considered odd-neutronnuclei and their even neighbours has been obtained.