The nuclei belonging to the actinide region are radioactive and may proceed to the exit channel via various disintegration modes. One of the interesting candidates is the ${}^{252}\mathrm{Cf}$ nucleus, which may disintegrate via binary, ternary, and or quaternary channels. The present work explores these decay modes using a quantum mechanical fragmentation theory (QMFT)-based approach. First of all, the most common decay mode, i.e., binary decay, is explored using the fragmentation structure. The most probable decaying fragments are identified in reference to the minima of the fragmentation potential. The competing analysis of these fragments triggered that the α decay is the most prominent disintegration mode among its competing channels. Interestingly, the α particle is also experimentally detected in ternary ($A_1^{\prime },\alpha ,A_2^{\prime }$) and quaternary ($A_1^{″},\alpha ,\alpha ,A_2^{″}$) processes. Hence, it will be of interest to do a competing analysis of these decay modes ($\alpha +$one/two/three fragments) using the collective clusterization approach. The particles heavier than α are detected in different decay modes of ${}^{252}\mathrm{Cf}$ nucleus, which motivated us to study the heavy particle-accompanied fission. The emergence of heavy fragment modes are worked out in view of the fragmentation structure, and the most probable heavy fragments are identified in view of three- ($A_1^{\prime }\ge A_2^{\prime }\ge A_3^{\prime }$) and four-body ($A_1^{″}\ge A_2^{″}\ge A_3^{″}\ge A_4^{″}$) emission mode. Interestingly, few cases are identified where ternary and quaternary fission seems equally probable. After the fragmentation analysis, the barrier characteristics of probable combinations are compared, respectively. The results are compared with the available experimental data and few predictions are made for future validations. In addition to this, the relative yield of ternary and quaternary fission is analyzed by taking different surface separation ($s$).

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• Alpha decay
• Fission
• Heavy-particle decays
• A ≥ 220
• Cluster models