Nuclear mass systematics using neural networks

New global statistical models of nuclidic (atomic) masses based on multilayered feedforward networks are developed. One goal of such studies is to determine how well the existing data, and only the data, determines the mapping from the proton and neutron numbers to the mass of the nuclear ground state. Another is to provide reliable predictive models that can be used to forecast mass values away from the valley of stability. Our study focuses mainly on the former goal and achieves substantial improvement over previous neural-network models of the mass table by using improved schemes for coding and training. The results suggest that with further development this approach may provide a valuable complement to conventional global models. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.