• Accepted Paper

Physics-guided residual correction of α-decay half-lives based on the effective liquid drop model

Qingning Yuan, Xuanpeng Xiao, Panpan Qi, Anqi Yang, Gongming Yu, Haitao Yang, Zhangyan Li, and Yanbing Cai

Phys. Rev. C - Accepted 7 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/7gm3-2y7f

Abstract

To improve the prediction accuracy of α-decay half-lives in heavy and superheavy nuclei, a physics-guided residual-correction framework combining the effective liquid drop model (ELDM) with machine-learning methods is proposed. The ELDM is first used as the macroscopic baseline for describing the barrier-penetration process, and XGBoost and TabPFN models are then employed to learn the residual deviations between ELDM predictions and experimental data. Several physically motivated descriptors associated with nuclear deformation, Coulomb–decay-energy systematics, and minimum orbital angular momentum are introduced into the residual-learning process. In the global 10-fold cross-validation comparison, TabPFN-term3 achieves the lowest prediction errors, reducing the RMSE and MAE from 0.567 and 0.417 for the ELDM baseline to 0.348 and 0.248, corresponding to improvements of 38.62% and 40.53%, respectively. Regional, parity-separated, and superheavy extrapolation analyses further support the effectiveness and transferability of the residual-correction framework. Overall, the proposed approach effectively reduces systematic deviations not fully described by the macroscopic ELDM baseline while retaining a direct connection to the underlying α-decay physics.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation

If the author has provided any supplemental materials with this article they will be available upon publication of the version of record.

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation