Fabrication of large ceramic electrolyte disks

Process for sintering compressed ceramic powders produces large ceramic disks for use as electrolytes in high-temperature electrolytic cells. Thin, strain-free uniformly dense disks as large as 30 cm squared have been fabricated by slicing ceramic slugs produced by this technique

Covariant theory of particle-vibrational coupling and its effect on the single-particle spectrum

The Relativistic Mean Field (RMF) approach describing the motion of independent particles in effective meson fields is extended by a microscopic theory of particle vibrational coupling. It leads to an energy dependence of the relativistic mass operator in the Dyson equation for the single-particle propagator. This equation is solved in the shell-model of Dirac states. As a result of the dynamics of particle-vibrational coupling we observe a noticeable increase of the level density near the Fermi surface. The shifts of the single-particle levels in the odd nuclei surrounding 208-Pb and the corresponding distributions of the single-particle strength are discussed and compared with experimental data.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

Fission barriers in actinides in covariant density functional theory: the role of triaxiality

Relativistic mean field theory allowing for triaxial deformations is applied for a systematic study of fission barriers in the actinide region. Different pairing schemes are studied in details and it is shown that covariant density functional theory is able to describe fission barriers on a level of accuracy comparable with non-relativistic calculations, even with the best phenomenological macroscopic+microscopic approaches. Triaxiality in the region of the first saddle plays a crucial role in achieving that.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figure

Nuclear energy density functionals: what we can learn about/from their global performance?

A short review of recent results on the global performance of covariant energy density functionals is presented. It is focused on the analysis of the accuracy of the description of physical observables of ground and excited states as well as to related theoretical uncertainties. In addition, a global analysis of pairing properties is presented and the impact of pairing on the position of two-neutron drip line is discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, Proceedings of the conference on Nuclei and Mesoscopic Physics 2014, MS