Nuclear Liquid Drop Model with the Surface-Curvature Terms: New Perspectives for the Hyperdeformation Studies

Nuclear liquid drop model is revisited and an explicit introduction of the surface-curvature terms is presented. The corresponding parameters of the extended classical energy formula are adjusted to the contemporarily known nuclear binding energies and ssion barrier heights. Using 2766 binding energies of nuclei with Z 8a ndN 8 it is shown that the performance of the new approach is improved by a factor of about 6, compared to the previously published liquid drop model results, in terms of both the masses (new r.m.s. deviation =0 :698 MeV) and the ssion barriers (new r.m.s. deviation of the ssion barriers of isotopes with Z> 70 is =0 :88 MeV). The role of the curvature terms and their eects on the description of the experimental quantities are discussed in detail; for comparison the parameters of the more ’traditional’ approaches are re-tted taking into account the nuclear masses known today and the performances of several variants of the model are compared. The isospin dependence in the new description of the barriers is in a good agreement with the extended Thomas-Fermi approach; it also demonstrates a good qualitative agreement with the ssion life-time systematics tested on the long chain of Fermium isotopes known experimentally. The new approach oers also a very high stability in terms of the extrapolation from the narrower range of nuclides to a more extended one - a property of particular interest for the contemporary exotic beam projects: the