Nuclear charge radii of heavy and superheavy nuclei from the experimental α-decay energies and half-lives

The radius of a nucleus is one of the important quantities in nuclear physics. Although there are many researches on ground-state properties of superheavy nuclei, researches on charge radii of superheavy nuclei are rare. In this article, nuclear root-mean-square (rms) charge radii of heavy and superheavy nuclei are extracted from the experimental alpha-decay data. alpha-decay calculations are performed within the generalized density-dependent cluster model, where alpha-decay half-lives are evaluated using quasibound state wave functions. The charge distribution of daughter nuclei is determined in the double-folding model to reproduce the experimental alpha-decay half-lives. The rms charge radius is then calculated using the resulting charge distribution. In addition, a simple formula is also proposed to calculate nuclear charge radii with the experimental alpha-decay energies and half-lives. The formula is directly derived from the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin barrier penetration probability with some approximations. The two different methods show good agreement with the experimental data for even-even nuclei, and the deduced results are consistent with other theoretical models. Moreover, nuclear radii of heavy and superheavy nuclei with Z = 98-116 are extracted from the alpha-decay data, for which alpha decay is a unique tool to probe nuclear sizes at present. This is the first result on nuclear charge radii of superheavy nuclei based on the experimental alpha-decay data. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.87.024310