https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-022-00833-4
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Structure of 
Xe through multi-reference energy density functional calculations
1
ESNT, IRFU, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
2
Departamento de Física Teórica, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049, Madrid, Spain
3
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 16, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany
4
Université de Lyon, Institut de Physique des 2 Infinis de Lyon, IN2P3-CNRS-UCBL, 4 rue Enrico Fermi, 69622, Villeurbanne, France
Received:
27
July
2022
Accepted:
9
September
2022
Published online:
29
September
2022
Recently, values for the Kumar quadrupole deformation parameters of the nucleus 
Xe have been computed from the results of a Coulomb excitation experiment, indicating that this xenon isotope has a prominent triaxial ground state. Within a different context, it was recently argued that the analysis of particle correlations in the final states of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions performed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) points to a similar structure for the adjacent isotope, 
Xe. In the present work, we report on state-of-the-art multi-reference energy density functional calculations that combine projection on proton and neutron number as well as angular momentum with shape mixing for the three isotopes Xe using the Skyrme-type pseudo-potential SLyMR1. Exploring the triaxial degree of freedom, we demonstrate that the ground states of all three isotopes display a very pronounced triaxial structure. Moreover, comparison with experimental results shows that the calculations reproduce fairly well the low-energy excitation spectrum of the two even-mass isotopes. By contrast, the calculation of Xe reveals some deficiencies of the effective interaction.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022. Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
