Spontaneous fission half-lives of actinides and super-heavy elements

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to calculate spontaneous fission half-lives of actinides and super-heavy elements using a macroscopic-microscopic potential-energy surface and WKB tunneling, achieving predictions within three orders of magnitude of experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive deformation landscape with four parameters and compares different inertia tensor models to accurately predict fission half-lives.

Findings

Reproduces empirical half-lives within 3 orders of magnitude.

Uses Fourier shape parametrization with four deformation parameters.

Employs irrotational flow approach for inertia tensor calculation.

Abstract

Spontaneous fission half-lives of actinide and super-heavy nuclei are calculated, using the least-action integral, through the WKB tunneling probability of the barrier that appears in the deformation landscape obtained in the macroscopic-microscopic potential-energy surface. This deformation-energy landscape is obtained using a Fourier shape parametrization with 4 deformation parameters, taking into account the nuclear elongation, left-right asymmetry, neck formation and non-axiality degrees of freedom. The collective inertia tensor entering the WKB half-life expression is given through the so-called irrotational flow approach, successfully used in nuclear fission to reproduce observables that characterize the nuclear system in the vicinity of the scission configurations, such as fragment mass or charge distributions. For a comparisons, we have also used the so-called phenomenological mass parameter depending only on the center-of-mass difference of the forming fission fragments. Our approach is shown to be able to reproduce empirical fission half-lives of all here considered nuclei to within 3 orders of magnitude.