Accurate spontaneous fission half-lives from a microscopic large-scale nuclear structure model

We demonstrate that energy density functional (EDF) models for atomic nuclei can achieve a level of accuracy in describing fission properties comparable to that of more phenomenological approaches, while maintaining predictive power for nuclear ground-state observables. Using multiple BSkG parameterizations, we conducted a comprehensive benchmark of spontaneous fission (SF) half-lives and compare our predictions with all available experimental data - 136 values - from both ground states and fission isomers. Leveraging the quality of the BSkG functionals and explicitly accounting for more than two collective degrees of freedom in our calculations, we attained one of the closest agreements with experiment reported by an EDF model so far—within less than four orders of magnitude. This level of accuracy, together with the computational efficiency of our method, opens the way to systematic studies of the thousands of neutron-rich nuclei crucial for modeling r-process nucleosynthesis and the inclusion of SF half-lives into the fitting protocol of future EDF models.