Bifurcation and fission in the liquid drop model: A phase-field approach

The liquid drop model, originally used to model atomic nuclei, describes the competition between surface tension and Coulomb force. To help understand how a ball loses stability and becomes prone to fission, we calculate the minimum energy path of the fission process and study the bifurcation branch conjectured by Bohr and Wheeler. We then present the two-dimensional analog for comparison. Our study is conducted with the help of numerical simulations via a phase-field approach.