Axial and reflection asymmetry of the nuclear ground state

More than a decade ago we published a calculation of nuclear ground-state masses and deformations in Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables [P. Moller, J.R. Nix, W.D. Myers, W.J. Swiatecki, At. Data Nucl. Data Tables 59 (1995) 185]. In this study, triaxial nuclear shapes were not considered. We have now enhanced our model and studied the influence of triaxial shape degrees of freedom on the nuclear ground-state potential-energy (mass) and ground-state shape. It turns out that a few hundred nuclei are affected to a varying degree with the largest effect, about 0.7 MeV, occurring near Ru-108. We provide here a table of the calculated effects of triaxial shape degrees of freedom. Although axial-asymmetry effects were not considered in the 1995 mass calculation, it did study the effects of reflection-asymmetric shape degrees of freedom (epsilon(3)) on nuclear masses. However, the magnitude of the effect was not tabulated. Here, we provide such a table. In addition we calculate the effect in a much improved fashion: we search a four-dimensional deformation space (epsilon(2), epsilon(3), epsilon(4), and epsilon(6)). This is now possible because the computational resources available to us today are more than 100,000 times better than at the time we calculated the mass table published in 1995. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved