The fission barriers in Actinides and superheavy nuclei in covariant density functional theory

The impact of pairing correlations on the fission barriers is investigated in Relativistic Hartree-Bogoliubov (RHB) theory and Relativistic Mean Field (RMF)+BCS calculations. It is found that the pairing gap changes considerably with deformation and RMF+BCS calculations with constant gap do not provide an adequate description of the barriers. RHB calculations show that there is a substantial difference in the predicted barrier heights between zero-range and finite range pairing forces even in the case when the pairing strengths of these two forces are adjusted to the same value of the pairing gap at the ground state. For zero range forces the barrier heights depend on the renormalization procedure. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.