Reliability of liquid-drop terms in WS4 and DZ10

Determine which corresponding physical liquid-drop terms in the DZ10 and WS4 nuclear mass models provide the more reliable descriptions, particularly in regions where their term-by-term differences are large.

Background

The paper compares the volume, surface, volume-symmetry, surface-symmetry, Coulomb, and pairing contributions of the WS4 and DZ10 nuclear mass models. Although substantial discrepancies are found between the liquid-drop terms, especially for neutron-rich nuclei and for the volume-symmetry contribution, the comparison alone does not establish which model gives the more reliable physical description of any individual term. The authors explicitly leave unresolved the task of identifying the more reliable term-level description in either model.

References

However, it is not possible to definitively determine which physical term in the DZ10 is more reliable than in the WS4, or vice versa.

— Interpretable hybrid nuclear mass prediction based on term-by-term model discrepancies  (2609.19578 - Ye et al., 17 Sep 2026) in Section III, subsection “Term-by-term comparison”