Enhancement of Alpha Decay due to Medium Effects

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a medium influences alpha decay rates, revealing that medium effects significantly enhance decay rates at low Q-values, with potential implications for nuclear physics experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a simple spherical potential model to analyze medium effects on alpha decay, highlighting substantial rate enhancements at low Q-values.

Findings

Medium effects cause significant decay rate enhancement at low Q-values.

For large Q-values, medium effects are negligible.

The model suggests potential experimental applications.

Abstract

We study the effect of medium on radioactive alpha decay and other similar decays. The initial state in these type of decays is a quasi-bound state with energy greater than zero. Such a state has very large amplitude in the nuclear region and is exponentially suppressed at larger distances. The decay rate of such states is known to decrease rapidly with decrease in the Q-value. Here we study such a decay within a medium. We assume a simple spherically symmetric repulsive potential model for the medium. This models the cumulative effect of all nuclei in the medium which at short distances present repulsive Coulomb interaction. We find that as the Q-value becomes very small, the medium effects lead to a substantial enhancement in rate. In contrast, for large Q-values, the medium effects are negligible. We briefly comment on application to real systems and the experimental implications of this result.