Revisiting the alpha-decay reduced width of the lightest uranium isotope ²¹⁴U*

Abstract The lightest uranium isotope has been produced at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou, China. The α -decay reduced width ( ) of has been found to be significantly larger than those of other nuclei by a factor of 2. However, the extraction of depends on the penetration probability ( P ) through the barrier, and P is related to the theoretical method of obtaining it and the form of the α -core potential. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the selections of the α -core potential and the method of calculating P can affect the above conclusion. Four different phenomenological α -core potentials and two microscopic double-folding potentials, together with the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation and transfer matrix (TM) approach, are used to obtain P . The value of P obtained using the WKB approximation is about 20%−40% smaller than the one obtained using the TM approach. Thus, the deduced is overestimated. The choice of α -core potential can significantly affect the value of . With the spherical form for the α -core potentials, the of obtained with both the WKB and TM approaches are about twice as large as those of the surrounding nuclei. With the deformed double-folding potential, the ratio between of and that of the surrounding nuclei is observed to be slightly below 2. The effects of nuclear deformation and the α -core potential should be considered when studying the α -decay reduced width in the systematics.