Neutron Drip-Line Topography.

The development of microscopic mass models is a crucial ingredient for the understanding of how most of the elements of our world were fabricated. Confidence in drip-line predictions of such models requires their comparison with new mass data for nuclides far from stability. We combine theory and experiment using results that are state of the art: the latest mass measurements from the Penning-trap spectrometer ISOLTRAP at CERN-ISOLDE are used to confront the predictions of the latest Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) microscopic mass models. In addition, we compare the new data to predictions of other types of mass models and the extrapolative behavior of the various models is analyzed to highlight topographical trends along the shores of the nuclear chart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]