Tetrahedral symmetry in Zr nuclei: Calculations of low-energy excitations with Gogny interaction

We report on the results of the calculations of the low energy excitation patterns for three Zirconium isotopes, viz ⁸⁰Zr₄₀, ⁹⁶Zr₅₆ and ¹¹⁰Zr₇₀, reported by other authors to be doubly-magic tetrahedral nuclei (with tetrahedral magic numbers Z = 40 and N = 40, 56 and 70). We employ the realistic Gogny effective interactions using three variants of their parametrization and the particle-number, parity and the angular-momentum projection techniques. We confirm quantitatively that the resulting spectra directly follow the pattern expected from the group theory considerations for the tetrahedral symmetric quantum objects. We also find out that, for all the nuclei studied, the correlation energy obtained after the angular momentum projection is very large for the tetrahedral deformation as well as other octupole deformations. The lowering of the energies of the resulting configurations is considerable, i.e. by about 10 MeV or even more, once again confirming the significance of the angular-momentum projections techniques in the mean-field nuclear structure calculations.