A critique of angular correlation analyses following α-decay

The formalism for the analysis of (α–γ) angular correlations following α-decay, which has been widely used for more than 50 years, was derived to incorporate the (mainly Coulomb) interference between competing α-partial waves.However, it is shown that the more fundamental angular correlation formalism, (expressed in terms of the population parameters and statistical tensors of the γ-ray emitting state), which underpins the derived (α–γ) formalism above, is more versatile for (α–γ) angular correlation analysis than the long-established α-partial wave approach.