New numerical method for fission half-lives of heavy and superheavy nuclei at ground and excited states

The spontaneous fission half-lives for heavy and superheavy nuclei between U and Hs isotopes are calculated in framework of the generalized liquid drop model by applying a new method of numerically solving Schrödinger equation compared with the semi-empirical WKB approximation. The calculated half-lives are in very good agreement with the experimental data, indicating the reliability of the new approach. The second part of this work is to estimate the fission half-lives of 238Np⁎ at excited state of 7.3 MeV and 239U⁎ at excited states of 7.081, 8.078, 8.387 and 8.989 MeV with the numerical method. The estimated results compared with the experimental values and with the results by WKB approximation show the numerical method is applicable to both the spontaneous fission and excited fission.