ABSTRACT
A large number of papers have been devoted to the computation of the nuclear deformation energy by means of the macroscopic-microscopic method developed by Strutinsky. 1-3 The main ingredients are described in the preceding chapters: nuclear shape parametrization (Chapter 1), liquid drop model deformation energy, ELo• of a given shape (Chapters 2 to 4), single-particle energies in a deformed field that has the nuclear surface as an equipotential (Chapter 5), shell and pairing corrections 8U and 8P for neutron-and proton-level schemes (Chapter 6):
For a heavy nucleus, the ground-state binding energy is of the order of 2000 MeV, the LDM deformation energy variation during the fission process is about 200 MeV, and the sum of shell and pairing corrections, oscillating with deformation and with nucleon number, has an amplitude usually not larger than 10 MeV.
