Description and prediction of even-<italic>A</italic> nuclear masses based on residual proton–neutron interactions.

The odd–even staggering of neighboring nuclear masses is very useful in calculating local mass relations and nucleon-pair correlations. During the past decades, there has been an increasing interest in the odd–even features of the mass relations and related quantities exhibited in masses of neighboring nuclei. In this work, after choosing a nucleus, we made an analysis of its neighboring nuclei on the upper left corner and the lower right corner, respectively. We empirically obtained a new residual interaction formula of even-A (A is the mass number) nuclei, and it is a revision based on the existing empirical local formula of the proton–neutron interactions between the last proton and the last neutron (δ V 1 p − 1 n). We then calculated the even-A nuclear masses. The differences between our calculated values and the AME2012 database show that the root-mean-squared deviations (RMSD) are small (for even-A nuclei: A ≥ 42, RMSD ≈ 161 keV; A ≥ 100, RMSD ≈ 125 keV), while for heavy nuclei, some of our calculated values can reach an accuracy of a few tens of keV. With our residual interaction formula including one parameter, we have successfully predicted some unknown masses. Some of our predicted values are compared well with the experimental values (AME2016). In addition, the accuracy and simplicity of our predicted masses for medium and heavy nuclei are comparable to those of the AME2012 (AME2016) extrapolations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]