Nuclear isospin asymmetry in $\alpha$ decays of heavy nuclei

Abstract

The effects of nuclear isospin asymmetry on $\alpha$ decay lifetimes of heavy nuclei are investigated within various phenomenological models of nuclear potential for the $\alpha$ particle. We consider the widely used simple square well potential and Woods-Saxon potential, and modify them by including an isospin asymmetry term. We then suggest a model for the potential of the $\alpha$ particle motivated by a microscopic phenomenological approach of the Skyrme force model, which naturally introduce the isospin dependent form of the nuclear potential for the $\alpha$ particle. The empirical $\alpha$ decay lifetime formula of Viola and Seaborg is also modified to include isospin asymmetry effects. The obtained $\alpha$ decay half-lives are in good agreement with the experimental data and we find that including the nuclear isospin effects somehow improves the theoretical results for $\alpha$ decay half-lives. The implications of these results are discussed and the predictions on the $\alpha$ decay lifetimes of superheavy elements are also presented.

14 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables, Accepted by PRC 94, 024320 (2016)

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• $\alpha$-decay properties of ${}^{296}118$ from double-folding potentials
• Nuclear energy density functional and the nuclear alpha decay
• A global potential constrained by the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization condition for $\alpha$-decay half-lives of even-even nuclei