Study of superdeformation at zero spin with Skyrme-Hartree-Fock method

Superdeformed (SD) bands have been studied extensively both experimentally and theoretically in the last decade. Since the first observation in 152Dy in 1986, SD bands have been found in four mass regions, i.e., A ∼ 80, 130, 150 and 190. While these SD bands have been observed only at high spins so far, they may also be present at zero spin like fission isomers in actinide nuclei: The familiar generic argument on the strong shell effect at axis ratio 2:1 does not assume rotations. If non-fissile SD isomers exist at zero spin, they may be utilized to develop new experimental methods to study exotic states, in a similar manner as short-lived high-spin isomers are planned to be utilized as projectiles of fusion reactions in order to populate very high-spin near-yrast states. They will also be useful to test theoretical models whether the models can describe correctly the large deformations of rare-earth nuclei without further complications due to rotations. In this report, we employ the Skyrme-Hartree-Fock method to study the SD states at zero spin. First, we compare various Skyrme force parameter sets to test whether they can reproduce the extrapolated excitation energy of the SD band head of 194Hg. Second, we systematically search large-deformation solutions with the SkM* force. The feature of our calculations is that the single-particle wavefunctions are expressed in a three-dimensional-Cartesian-mesh representation. This representation enables one to obtain solutions of various shapes (including SD) without preparing a basis specific to each shape. Solving the mean-field equations in this representation requires, however, a large amount of computation which can be accomplished only with present supercomputers. (author)