Further explorations of Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mass formulas. VIII. Role of Coulomb exchange

Following suggestions that the energy associated with Coulomb correlations and a possible charge-symmetry breaking of nuclear forces might largely cancel the Coulomb-exchange term, we refit the HFB-14 mass model without the Coulomb-exchange term to essentially all the mass data. The resulting mass model, HFB-15, gives a better fit to the 2149 mass data, σᵣₘₛ falling from 0.729 to 0.678 MeV. The improvement in the energy differences between mirror nuclei is particularly striking: the Nolen-Schiffer anomaly, which is strong for HFB-14, is essentially eliminated. As for the extrapolation to highly neutron-rich nuclei, the HFB-15 model differs significantly from HFB-14, with up to 15 MeV less binding being predicted. However, the differences in the predicted values of differential quantities such as the neutron-separation energies, {β}-decay energies and fission barriers are very much smaller.