Speaker
Description
Nuclei are self-bound quantum many-body systems dominated by the strong interaction, for which isospin is an approximately good quantum number.
In realistic nuclei, however, isospin symmetry is explicitly broken primarily by electromagnetic effects, most importantly the Coulomb repulsion among protons.
Quantifying how the Coulomb interaction reshapes global nuclear systematics is therefore essential for assessing the usefulness of isospin as an organizing principle and for improving predictive theories toward the limits of stability.
In this work, we investigate Coulomb effects on ground-state quadrupole deformation and on the neutron drip line within nuclear density functional theory by solving the Skyrme Hartree--Fock--Bogoliubov (HFB) equations using the axially deformed solver HFBTHO (v3.00).
We perform systematic calculations for even--even nuclei over a wide region of the nuclear chart and compare two situations: calculations with the Coulomb interaction and without Coulomb interaction.
The quadrupole deformation parameter $\beta_2$ is taken as the dimensionless mass deformation, and bound nuclei are identified by negative chemical potentials.
To isolate Coulomb-induced shape changes, we analyze the difference $\Delta\beta_2 \equiv \left|\beta_2^{\mathrm{C}}\right|-\left|\beta_2^{\mathrm{NC}}\right|$ where ''C'' (''NC'') denotes calculations with (without) the Coulomb interaction.