Systematic study of deformed nuclei at the drip lines and beyond

An improved prescription for choosing a Transformed Harmonic Oscillator (THO) basis for use in configuration-space Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) calculations is presented. The new HFB+THO framework that follows accurately reproduces the results of coordinate-space HFB calculations for spherical and axially-deformed nuclei, including those that are weakly bound. Furthermore, it is fully automated, facilitating its use in systematic investigations of large sets of nuclei throughout the periodic table. As a first application, we have carried out calculations using the Skyrme Force SkLY4 and volume pairing for all even-even nuclei from proton drip line to neutron drip-line having proton numbers Z = 4, 6, 8, ..., 108. We focus on those nuclei very near the drip lines and find that there exist numerous particle-bound even-even nuclei (i.e., nuclei with negative Fermi energies) that have negative two-proton or two-neutron separation energies. This phenomenon, which was earlier noted for light nuclei only, is now seen to occur in several diverse regions of the periodic table.