Determination of shell energies. Nuclear deformations and fission barriers

We have been studying a method of determining nuclear shell energies and incorporating them into a mass formula. The main feature of this method lies in estimating shell energies of deformed nuclei from spherical shell energies. We adopt three assumptions, from which the shell energy of a deformed nucleus is deduced to be a weighted sum of spherical shell energies of its neighboring nuclei. This shell energy should be called intrinsic shell energy since the average deformation energy also acts as an effective shell energy. The ground-state shell energy of a deformed nucleus and its equilibrium shape can be obtained by minimizing the sum of these two energies with respect to variation of deformation parameters. In addition, we investigate the existence of fission isomers for heavy nuclei with use of the obtained shell energies. (author)