Large-scale fission-barrier calculations with the ETFSI method

Within the context of a project to treat all the nuclear aspects of the astrophysical r-process on a unified microscopic basis, we have extended the ETFSI (extended Thomas-Fermi plus Strutinsky Integral) method to the calculation of fission barriers, and compared our results to a large number of measured barrier heights. With the force SkSC4, on which the ETFSI-1 mass formula was based, we find that if the primary (highest) barrier is lower than 10 MeV, the error never exceeds 1.4 MeV, with either sign being possible. For primary barrier heights lying between 10 and 15 MeV we probably overestimate the height by around 1.5 MeV. It should thus be possible to use the ETFSI method to make reliable calculations of the experimentally inaccessible fission barriers relevant to the r-process.