Tetrahedral instability in superheavy nuclei

The present study reports the possibility that the tetrahedral symmetry may manifest itself in superheavy elements through the nortaxial octupole Y-32 deformation. The calculations of nortaxial octupole bands are performed by using the Reflection Asymmetric Shell Model for some transfermium nuclei where the spectroscopic data are available, and a very good agreement between theory and experiment has been achieved.