Residual correlations in liquid drop mass calculations

A systematic study of correlations in the chart of calculated masses of Moller and Nix is presented. It is shown that the differences between the masses calculated by Moller at al and the measured ones have a well defined oscillatory component as function of N and Z, which can be removed with an appropriate fit, reducing significantly the error width, and concentrating the error distribution on a single peak around zero. The residual correlations can have important consequences in the errors as signaling the presence of chaos, as was recently proposed.