A class of relativistic nuclear energy density functionals is explored, in which only nucleon degrees of freedom are explicitly used in the construction of effective interaction terms. Short-distance correlations, as well as intermediate and long-range dynamics, are encoded in the nucleon-density dependence of the strength functionals of an effective interaction Lagrangian. The resulting phenomenological effective interaction, adjusted to experimental binding energies of a large set of axially deformed nuclei, together with a new separable pairing interaction adjusted to reproduce the pairing gap in nuclear matter calculated with the Gogny force, is applied in triaxial relativistic Hartree-Bogoliubov calculations of sequences of heavy nuclei: Th , U , Pu , Cm , Cf , Fm , and No .
Nuclear energy density functionals from empirical ground-state densities
