Further explorations of Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mass formulas. III. Role of particle-number projection

Starting from HFB-6, we have constructed a new mass table, referred to as HFB-8, including all the 9200 nuclei lying between the two drip lines over the range of Z and N⩾8 and Z⩽120. It differs from HFB-6 in that the wave function is projected on the exact particle number. Like HFB-6, the isoscalar effective mass M_s^* is constrained to the value 0.80M and the pairing is density independent. The rms errors of the mass-data fit is 0.635 MeV, i.e. better than almost all our previous HFB mass formulas. The extrapolations of this new mass formula out to the drip lines do not differ significantly from the previous HFB-6 mass formula.