Robustness of heavy and superheavy nuclei against α decay: Progress toward identifying the possible location of the “island of stability”

Abstract

As for the dominant decay channel of superheavy nuclei, we have reshaped the crucial nuclear potential in the $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-decay process through the systematical analysis of available experimental decay data. Specifically, a Fermi-type renormalization factor brings us an effective $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-daughter potential so that we can obtain the decay energy and half-life on the same footing, which exactly corresponds to the stability of nuclei. During this procedure, the $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ preformation factor is related with the recalculated pairing and shell corrections. Besides the excellent agreement between theory and experiment for both the decay energy and the half-life, we extend the study to available short-lived nuclei in the superheavy-mass region as a predictive set. It is found that the present $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-core potential can figure out the decay scheme of these superheavy $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ emitters very well. Encouraged by this, it is expected that the following predictions on the heaviest nuclei can be valuable for discussing their robustness and shed some light on the ``island of stability'' plus the fundamental mass of unknown nuclides from a novel perspective.