Microscopic description of superheavy nuclei

The results of extensive microscopic relativistic mean field (RMF) calculations for the nuclei appearing in the a-decay chains of recently discovered superheavy elements with 109 <= Z <= 118 are presented and discussed. The calculated ground-state properties like total binding energies, Q-values, deformations, radii, and densities closely agree with the corresponding experimental data, where available. The root mean square radii closely follow A(1/3) law (A being the mass number) with the constant r(o) = 0.9639 +/- 0.0005 fm. The double folding (tpp) approximation is used to calculate the interaction potential between the daughter and the alpha, using RMF densities along with the density-dependent nucleon-nucleon interaction (M3Y). This in turn is employed within the WKB approximation to estimate the half-lives without any additional parameter for alpha-decay. The half-lives are highly sensitive to the Q-values used and qualitatively agree with the corresponding experimental values. The use of experimental Q-values in the WKB approximation improves the agreement with the experiment, indicating that the resulting interaction potential is reliable and can be used with confidence as the real part of the optical potential in other scattering and reaction processes. (c) 200