Alpha-particle formation and decay rates from Skyrme–HFB wave functions

alpha decay is treated microscopically, where the unstable mother nucleus and residual daughter nucleus are described using Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) wave functions, obtained with the Skyrme effective interaction. From these wave functions the amplitude for forming alpha particles in the mother nucleus is computed. Two different Skyrme parametrizations with different pairing properties are compared, and we find good agreement with experiment for relative decay rates in both cases. The absolute values of the decay rates are underestimated.