A new radioactivity

Abstract

The author discusses new natural radioactivities with emission of 14C, 24Ne and 28Mg (cluster radioactivity) in the framework of an open quantum nuclear dynamics (fragmentation theory) which uses few collective modes as open quantum systems. Firstly, by assuming that the dissipation could be neglected, it is shown that on the potential energy surface, in addition to the liquid drop model valley corresponding to normal fission, appear other valleys: Pb valley for cluster radioactivity, Sn valley for the bimodal fission or cold fission and alpha valley for the alpha decay. This leads to a unified description of the above decays as spontaneous fission modes, in which one or both fragments have magic or almost magic numbers, a new form of radioactivity-magic radioactivity. Secondly, it is shown that for processes in which the dissipation could not be neglected, like charge equilibration in deep inelastic collisions, the new quantum nuclear dynamics describes excellently the experimental data. Thirdly, it is shown that the nuclear molecules are strongly correlated with the above decays. The author concludes that all the processes which imply large rearrangements of nucleons could be suitably described as open quantum systems.