α-decay calculations of heavy nuclei using an effective Skyrme interaction
Abstract
Background: For nuclei heavier than 208Pb α decay is a dominating decay mode, and in the search of new superheavy elements one often observes chains of α decays. Purpose: Explore and test microscopic descriptions of α decay based on theories with effective nuclear interactions. Methods: The nuclear ground states are calculated with the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) method using the Skyrme interaction. Microscopic α-decay formation amplitudes are calculated from the HFB wave functions, and the R-matrix formalism is utilized to obtain decay probabilities. Results: Using a large harmonic-oscillator basis we obtain converged α-decay widths. A comparison with experiment including all spherical even-even α emitting nuclei shows that the model consistently predicts too small formation amplitudes while relative values are in good agreement with experiment. Conclusions: The method was found to be numerically practical even with a large basis size. The comparison of formation amplitudes suggests that the pairing type correlations included in the HFB approach cannot produce sufficient α-particle clustering.