The shape of gold

Understand

Having a detailed theoretical knowledge of the low-energy structure of the heavy odd-mass nucleus $^{197}$Au is of prime interest as the structure of this isotope represents an important input to theoretical simulations of collider experiments involving gold ions performed worldwide at relativistic energies.

• In the present article, therefore, we report on new results on the structure of $^{197}$Au obtained from state-of-the-art multi-reference energy density functional (MR-EDF) calculations.
• Our MR-EDF calculations were realized using the Skyrme-type pseudo-potential SLyMR1, and include beyond mean-field correlations through the mixing, in the spirit of the Generator Coordinate Method (GCM), of particle-number and angular-momentum projected triaxially deformed Bogoliubov quasi-particle states.
• Comparison with experimental data shows that the model gives a reasonable description of $^{197}$Au with in particular a good agreement for most of the spectroscopic properties of the $3/2_1^+$ ground state.