Enhanced Stability of Superheavy Nuclei due to High-Spin Isomerism

Abstract

Configuration-constrained calculations of potential-energy surfaces in even-even superheavy nuclei reveal systematically the existence at low excitation energies of multi-quasiparticle states with deformed axially symmetric shapes and large angular momenta. These results indicate the prevalence of long-lived, multi-quasiparticle isomers. In a quantal system, the ground state is usually more stable than the excited states. In contrast, in superheavy nuclei the multi-qausiparticle excitations decrease the probability for both fission and $\alpha$ decay, implying enhanced stability. Hence, the systematic occurrence of multi-qausiparticle isomers may become crucial for future production and study of even heavier nuclei. The energies of multi-quasiparticle states and their $\alpha$ decays are calculated and compared to available data.

4 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in PRL

References in corpus (3)

• Shell structure of superheavy nuclei in self-consistent mean-field models
• Shell Structure of the Superheavy Elements
• Superheavy nuclei in selfconsistent nuclear calculations

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