How to calculate α-decay rates in the future?

Abstract

New elements discovered during past decades have been created in fusion reactions where a lighter nucleus is collided with a heavier one. The new elements created often decay by emitting α particles. From the half-lives of the decays and the energies of the emitted particles one may extract some properties of the new elements. In this talk the recent work performed by the Lund group to model α decay starting from nuclear density-functional theory is reviewed and a possible extension is mentioned.