Adiabatic fission barriers in superheavy nuclei

Using the microscopic-macroscopic model based on the deformed Woods-Saxon single-particle potential and the Yukawa-plus-exponential macroscopic energy, we calculated static fission barriers B-f for 1305 heavy and superheavy nuclei 98 <= Z <= 126, including even-even, odd-even, even-odd and odd-odd systems. For odd and odd-odd nuclei, adiabatic potential-energy surfaces were calculated by a minimization over configurations with one blocked neutron or/and proton on a level from the 10th below to the 10th above the Fermi level. The parameters of the model that have been fixed previously by a fit to masses of even-even heavy nuclei were kept unchanged. A search for saddle points has been performed by the imaginary water flow method on a basic five-dimensional deformation grid, including triaxiality. Two auxiliary grids were used for checking the effects of the mass asymmetry and hexadecapole nonaxiality. The ground states (g.s.) were found by energy minimization over configurations and deformations. We find that the nonaxiality significantly changes first and second fission saddle in many nuclei. The effect of the mass asymmetry, known to lower the second, very deformed saddles in actinides, in the heaviest nuclei appears at the less deformed saddles in more than 100 nuclei. It happens for those saddles in which the triaxiality does not play any role, which suggests a decoupling between effects of the mass asymmetry and triaxiality. We studied also the influence of the pairing interaction strength on the staggering of B-f for odd- and even-particle numbers. Finally, we provide a comparison of our results with other theoretical fission barrier evaluations and with available experimental estimates.