The shapes of conditional equilibrium in the liquid-drop model

The shape of the nuclear surface is defined looking for the minimum of liquid drop energy under the constraint of fixed volume, elongation and mass asymmetry. The method does not rely on any shape parameterization and leads to the shapes with the lowest energy. The results obtained with several deformation constraints are compared. The numerical methods used here for solving the variational problem allow for the straightforward generalizations which could include the surface diffuseness, nuclear interaction, separated shapes, eventually shell effects. (author)