  We present a new Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov nuclear-mass model in which
the contact-pairing force is constructed from microscopic pairing gaps of
symmetric nuclear matter and neutron matter calculated from realistic two- and
three-body forces, with medium-polarization effects included. With the pairing
being treated more realistically than in any of our earlier models, the rms
deviation with respect to essentially all the available mass data falls to
0.581 MeV, the best value ever found within the mean-field framework. Since our
Skyrme force is also constrained by the properties of pure neutron matter, this
new model is particularly well suited for application to astrophysical problems
involving a neutron-rich environment, such as the elucidation of the r process
of nucleosynthesis, and the description of supernova cores and neutron-star
crusts.
