Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2025) 140: 42
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-024-05942-1

Regular Article

Predictive analysis of decay pathways in doubly-odd superheavy nuclei

Department of Physics, Guru Nanak Dev University, 143005, Amritsar, India

^a harjeet.phy@gndu.ac.in

Received: 29 August 2024
Accepted: 23 December 2024
Published online: 16 January 2025

Abstract

The competition between $\alpha$-decay and spontaneous fission ($\text{SF}$) of unknown doubly-odd superheavy nuclei (SHN) is investigated by comparing their theoretical $\alpha$-decay half-lives ($T_{1/2}^{\alpha }$-values) and $\text{SF}$-half-lives ($T_{1/2}^{\text{SF}}$-values). At first, the calculations for the $\alpha$-particle’s preformation probabilities ($P_{\alpha }$’s) are performed for 66 doubly-odd $\alpha$-emitters with Z ranging from $83\le$ Z $\le$ 117 employing a microscopic phenomenological approach involving the energy density functional (EDF) of the Skyrme force within Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation. This methodology naturally incorporates the effect of the closed-shell structure in terms of global quantum number (G). The calculated results are also compared with those obtained using other theoretical methods. Our results also fit fairly well within $N_P{N}_{N}I$-scheme. Hence, we can estimate the preformation probabilities and predict $\alpha$-decay half-lives for unknown superheavy nuclei taking WS4 $\alpha$-disintegration energies as input. The study of branching ratios led us to identify $\alpha$-decay chains originating from these unknown SHN. We believe our predictions can aid future experiments in producing new superheavy elements.