  In spite of numerous scientific and practical applications, there is still no
comprehensive theoretical description of the nuclear fission process based
solely on protons, neutrons and their interactions. The most advanced
simulations of fission are currently carried out within nuclear density
functional theory (DFT). In spite of being fully quantum-mechanical and rooted
in the theory of nuclear forces, DFT still depends on a dozen or so parameters
characterizing the energy functional. Calibrating these parameters on
experimental data results in uncertainties that must be quantified for
applications. This task is very challenging because of the high computational
cost of DFT calculations for fission. In this paper, we use Gaussian processes
to build emulators of DFT models in order to quantify and propagate statistical
uncertainties of theoretical predictions for a range of nuclear deformations
relevant to describing the fission process.
