Nuclear Liquid Drop Model with the Surface-Curvature Terms: New Perspectives for the Hyperdeformation Studies

Nuclear liquid drop model is revisited and an explicit introduction of the surface-curvature terms is presented. The corresponding parameters of the extended classical energy formula are adjusted to the contemporarily known nuclear binding energies and fission barrier heights. Using 2766 binding energies of nuclei with $Z\geq 8$ and $N\geq 8$ it is shown that the performance of the new approach is improved by a factor of about 6, compared to the previously published liquid drop model results, in terms of both the masses (new r.m.s. deviation $= 0.698$ MeV) and the fission barriers (new r.m.s. deviation of the fission barriers of isotopes with $Z> 70$ is $<\delta V_B> = 0.88$ MeV). The role of the curvature terms and their effects on the description of the experimental quantities are discussed in detail; for comparison the parameters of the more 'traditional' approaches are re-fitted taking into account the nuclear masses known today and the performances of several variants of the model are compared. The isospin dependence in the new description of the barriers is in a good agreement with the extended Thomas-Fermi approach; it also demonstrates a good qualitative agreement with the fission life-time systematics tested on the long chain of Fermium isotopes known experimentally. The new approach offers also a very high stability in terms of the extrapolation from the narrower range of nuclides to a more extended one - a property of particular interest for the contemporary exotic beam projects: the corresponding properties are illustrated and discussed.Comment: 25 pages in LaTeX and 20 figures in eps forma

On Charged Mesoscopic Metallic Bubbles

We investigate the existence of stable charged metallic bubbles using the shell correction method. We find that for a given mesoscopic system of n atoms of a given metal and q less n (positive) elementary charges, a metallic bubble turns out to have a lower total energy than a compact spherical cluster, whenever the charge number q is larger than acritical charge number q_c. For a magic number (n-q) of free electrons, the spherical metallic bubble may become stable against fission.Comment: 14 pages in Latex and 5 figures in the eps forma

Shell Structure of Cesium Layer Covering the C60 Fullerene Core

Strutinsky shell corrections for the Cesium-coated fullerenes were investigated. The single particle levels of electrons are obtained using the spherical mean-field potential of a shifted Wood-Saxon type. The parameters of the potential are adjusted to reproduce the experimental ionization energies of the Cs(N) clusters and the magic numbers observed in their photo-ionization spectra of the C60Cs(N) aggregates.Comment: 6 pages in LaTex, 7 eps figure