On the Stability of Superheavy Nuclei against Fission, Alpha Decay and Electron Capture

Abstract The potential energy surface has been calculated by two methods which are compared with re­spect to spontaneous fission. In the first one essentially the sum of the single particle energies is computed as was done in a previous paper3 while in the second one the Strutinsky technique of renormalizing to a liquid drop model has been applied. Also the half-lives for electron capture are investigated together with the predictions of the half-lives for spontaneous fission and α-decay. The results support the existence of superheavy nuclei in the regions around Z = 114 and Z = 164.