Abstract:
Nuclear mass plays an important role in both nuclear physics and astrophysics. While the theoretical accuracy of masses has reached quite astonishing accuracy, their extrapolations have been conflicting, especially in neutron-rich regions. This paper reviews the main results of the extrapolations of nuclear mass models in recent years. By using a rigorous multi-objective optimization on mass models, we take the mass differences α decay energy and the Garvey-Kelson relations as multiple physical constraints to reduce the degree of overfitting phenomenon, resulting that the predictive power of models was improved in some degree. In addition, we use the improved mass data for the rapid neutron capture processes in nuclear astrophysics, further validating the reliability of the extrapolations.