Parameters of the Skyrme functional have been fitted to reproduce several physical quantities, with emphasis on the masses of magic nuclei. Therefore it is not surprising that dramatic modifications of the SO and tensor terms of the functional, described in Sec. 3, while improving the agreement between the calculated and measured single-particle properties, can destroy the quality of the mass fit. Hence, it is interesting to know whether this disagreement is significant and whether it can be healed by refitting the remaining parameters of the functional.
Table 5 shows differences between calculated and
experimental (Ref. [54])
ground-state energies,
, (in MeV)
for a set of spherical nuclei. Negative values mean that nuclei are overbound.
Results given in the second column,
denoted as SLy4, correspond to the standard SLy4 [19]
parametrization. The third column, denoted as SLy4
,
illustrates significant deterioration of the quality of fit when
parameters
,
and
are modified (see Sec. 3). Values presented in the last column,
SLy4
, were obtained by minimizing the rms
of relative discrepancies between the calculated and measured masses
Values of
,
and
were kept fixed at their SLy4
values, while
minimization was performed by varying the remaining parameters of the
functional
and
. Note that for the standard SLy4
functional, the tensor coupling constants are set equal to zero
independently of the values of
and
. For the minimization,
we have used the same methodology, namely, the influence of
parameters
and
on tensor coupling constants was
disregarded.
It should be emphasized that no attempt has been made to find the
global minimum -- the minimization was purely local, in the vicinity
of the standard SLy4 values of the parameters and
. One can see that even
this very limited procedure can lead to significant reduction of
discrepancies, down to quite reasonable values (with an exception
of
Ni nucleus).
It is worth noting that the resulting modifications of the and
parameters turned out to be very small. Table 6
shows the values of the
and
parameters in the standard SLy4
parametrization (second column) and those obtained as the result of
the minimization procedure (third column). The last column shows
relative changes of parameters (in percent). As one can see, they are
at most of the order of one percent. Nevertheless, even such small
changes were sufficient to improve significantly the agreement between
calculated and experimental masses.
We stress again that the refitting procedure is used here only for
illustration purposes and the global fit to masses must probably
include extended functionals and improved methodology. For example,
the Wigner energy correction [55] was not included in the fit, as it was neither
included in the fit of the SLy4 parametrization. This correction
alone may change the balance of discrepancies obtained for the
and
nuclei, and strongly impact the results. Systematic
studies of these effects will be performed in the near future.