Abstract
Abstract The standard microscopic description of fission, based on the mean-field Hartree–Fock-Bogoliubov approximation and a semi-classical description of tunneling through the fission barrier, has been used to analyse the impact of introducing a (perturbative) tensor term along with the well known Gogny-D1S force in the spontaneous fission half-lives. Calculations in a series of even–even isotopes of superheavy nuclei ranging from nobelium to darmstatium have been carried out. The results show that the tensor term only impacts the height of the first fission barrier and leaves mostly unaffected the pairing properties and therefore the collective inertias. As a consequence of the reduction in the barrier height, the spontaneous fission lifetimes obtained by including the tensor term are significantly smaller than the ones without it bringing the theoretical predictions in closer agreement with experimental data.