High precision nuclear mass predictions towards a hundred kilo-electron-volt accuracy

Mass is a fundamental property and an important fingerprint of atomic nucleus. It provides an extremely useful test ground for nuclear models and is crucial to understand energy generation in stars as well as the heavy elements synthesized in stellar explosions. Nuclear physicists have been attempting at developing a precise, reliable, and predictive nuclear model that is suitable for the whole nuclear chart, while this still remains a great challenge even in recent days. Here we employ the Fourier spectral analysis to examine the deviations of nuclear mass predictions to the experimental data and to present a novel way for accurate nuclear mass predictions. In this analysis, we map the mass deviations from the space of nucleon number to its conjugate space of frequency, and are able to pin down the main contributions to the model deficiencies. By using the radial basis function approach we can further isolate and quantify the sources. Taking a pedagogical mass model as an example, we examine explicitly the correlation between nuclear effective interactions and the distributions of mass deviations in the frequency domain. The method presented in this work, therefore, opens up a new way for improving the nuclear mass predictions towards a hundred kilo-electron-volt accuracy, which is argued to be the chaos-related limit for the nuclear mass predictions.