# Bremsstrahlung in 𝛼 Decay

## Abstract

A quantum mechanical analysis of the bremsstrahlung in $`\alpha `$ decay of <sup>210</sup>Po is performed in close reference to a semiclassical theory. We clarify the contribution from the tunneling, mixed, outside barrier regions and from the wall of the inner potential well to the final spectral distribution, and discuss their interplay. We also comment on the validity of semiclassical calculations, and the possibility to eliminate the ambiguity in the nuclear potential between the alpha particle and daughter nucleus using the bremsstrahlung spectrum.

Bremsstrahlung during $`\alpha `$ decay and fission is one of the intriguing current topics of nuclear physics. Kasagi et al. measured the bremsstrahlung in the $`\alpha `$ decay from <sup>210</sup>Po, and showed that the emission of low energy photons is systematically hindered from what one expects from the pure Coulomb acceleration of the $`\alpha `$ particle in the outside region of the potential barrier. They speculated that this reduction is caused by a destructive interference between the radiations in the tunneling and classically allowed regions, and thus might offer a possibility to learn about the tunneling time. They also calculated the spectral distribution based on a semiclassical theory of Dyakonov and Gornyi . Their calculations reproduce the experimental cross section well for low energy photons. In addition, an interesting thing is that their calculations give a hump in agreement with the measurement, which however has large error bars in that region. On the other hand, the intensity of the radiation observed by D’Arrigo et al.  for the alpha decay from <sup>226</sup>Ra and <sup>214</sup>Po is larger than the prediction of the pure Coulomb acceleration model. Also, their data show no structure in the spectral distribution as expected from a classical formula. In nuclear fission, a measurement by Luke et al. gave an upper bound to the bremsstrahlung rate for the spontaneous fission of <sup>252</sup>Cf.

Recently, Papenbrock and Bertsch performed a quantum mechanical calculation for the bremsstrahlung in $`\alpha `$ decay in perturbation theory . Their spectral distribution is monotonic, though it is within the error bars of the data in Ref.. The authors claim that the contribution from the tunneling wave function under the barrier is small. However, the definition of either classical or tunneling is not unique. More studies from various points of view are clearly needed in order to clarify the situation. The aim of this paper is to resolve these puzzling problems relating to the spectral distribution, especially on the role of the tunneling region. To this end, we perform a quantum mechanical analysis in a way which has a close relation to semiclassical theory. As we show later, quantum mechanical calculations are required to have quantitative accuracy, while a semiclassical theory provides a clear physical understanding of the phenomena by bridging the quantum mechanical and classical calculations of the bremsstrahlung. It also provides a more definitive understanding of the role of quantum tunneling by naturally dividing the whole region into the classical, mixed and tunneling regions through classical turning points.

Fermi’s golden rule gives the following expression for the photon emission per photon energy during $`\alpha `$ decay in the dipole approximation,

$$\frac{dP}{dE_\gamma }=\frac{4Z_{\mathrm{eff}}^2e^2}{3m^2c^3}\left|\mathrm{\Phi }_f\left|_rV\right|\mathrm{\Phi }_i\right|^2\frac{1}{E_\gamma },$$
(1)   
where $`V(r)`$ is the interaction between the $`\alpha `$ particle and the daughter nucleus as a function of their separation distance $`r`$, $`m`$ is their reduced mass and $`E_\gamma `$ is the photon energy. The effective charge $`Z_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ is given by $`Z_{\mathrm{eff}}=(A_DZ_\alpha A_\alpha Z_D)/A_P`$, where $`A_D,Z_D,A_\alpha ,Z_\alpha `$ and $`A_P`$ are the mass and atomic numbers of the daughter nucleus and of $`\alpha `$ particle, and the mass number of the parent nucleus, respectively. $`\mathrm{\Phi }_i(r)`$ and $`\mathrm{\Phi }_f(r)`$ are the appropriately normalized radial wave functions of the initial and final states of the $`\alpha `$ particle, respectively.

As in Ref., we take the following simple model for the interaction between the $`\alpha `$ particle and the daughter nucleus

$$V(r)=(Z_\alpha Z_De^2/r)\mathrm{\Theta }(rr_0)V_0\mathrm{\Theta }(r_0r).$$
(2)   
The initial and final state wave functions are given by

$`\mathrm{\Phi }_i`$ $`=`$ $`\{\begin{array}{cc}(m/\mathrm{}k_i)^{\frac{1}{2}}R_i(r)/r\hfill & (r>r_0)\hfill \\ N_ij_0(K_ir)\hfill & (r<r_0)\hfill \end{array}`$ (5)   
$`\mathrm{\Phi }_f`$ $`=`$ $`\{\begin{array}{cc}(2m/\pi \mathrm{}^2k_f)^{\frac{1}{2}}R_f(r)/r\hfill & (r>r_0)\hfill \\ N_fj_1(K_fr)\hfill & (r<r_0)\hfill \end{array}`$ (8)   
where $`R_i(r)=G_0(\eta _i,k_ir)+iF_0(\eta _i,k_ir)`$ and $`R_f(r)=F_1(\eta _f,k_fr)\mathrm{cos}\alpha +G_1(\eta _f,k_fr)\mathrm{sin}\alpha `$, $`\alpha `$ being the phase shift. The wave numbers in these equations are given by,

$`K_i`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{}^1\sqrt{2m(E_i+V_0)};k_i=\mathrm{}^1\sqrt{2mE_i}`$ (9)   
$`K_f`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{}^1\sqrt{2m(E_f+V_0)};k_f=\mathrm{}^1\sqrt{2mE_f}`$ (10)   
where $`E_i=E_\alpha `$, $`E_\alpha `$ being the energy of the $`\alpha `$ decay, $`E_f=E_\alpha E_\gamma =E_\alpha \mathrm{}\omega `$ and $`\eta `$ the Sommerfeld parameter.

The transition matrix in Eq.(1) now reads,

$`\mathrm{\Phi }_f\left|_rV\right|\mathrm{\Phi }_i`$ (11)   
$`=\sqrt{{\displaystyle \frac{2m^2}{\pi \mathrm{}^3k_ik_f}}}\left\{I_W+{\displaystyle _{r_0}^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑rA(r)R_f(r)R_i(r)\right\},`$ (12)   
where $`A(r)`$ stands for $`_rV=Z_\alpha Z_De^2r^2`$, and the wall contribution $`I_W`$ is given by

$$I_W=(Z_\alpha Z_De^2/r_0+V_0)R_f(r_0)R_i(r_0)$$
(13)   
If we denote the external turning points in the initial and final states by $`r_{ei}`$ and $`r_{ef}`$, respectively, the integration in Eq.(12) can be naturally divided into three parts, i.e. the integrations between $`r_0`$ and $`r_{ei}`$, between $`r_{ei}`$ and $`r_{ef}`$ and between $`r_{ef}`$ and $`\mathrm{}`$. We call them the tunneling, mixed and outside regions, respectively. Straight-forward calculations of each integral using the exact Coulomb wave functions will clarify the role of each term, especially the role of the tunneling region. Before we present the results of such quantum mechanical calculations, we wish to present semiclassical formulae for radiation.

They can be derived by replacing the quantum mechanical Coulomb wave functions by their semiclassical representations, which read 

$`F_{\mathrm{}}`$ $``$ $`\{\begin{array}{cc}(\frac{k}{k_{\mathrm{}}(r)})^{\frac{1}{2}}\mathrm{sin}(_{r_e}^rk_{\mathrm{}}(r)𝑑r+\frac{\pi }{4})\hfill & \text{(}r>r_e\text{)}\hfill \\ \frac{1}{2}(\frac{k}{\kappa _{\mathrm{}}(r)})^{\frac{1}{2}}\mathrm{exp}(_r^{r_e}\kappa _{\mathrm{}}(r)𝑑r)\hfill & \text{(}r<r_e\text{)}\hfill \end{array}`$ (16)   
$`G_{\mathrm{}}`$ $``$ $`\{\begin{array}{cc}(\frac{k}{k_{\mathrm{}}(r)})^{\frac{1}{2}}\mathrm{cos}(_{r_e}^rk_{\mathrm{}}(r)𝑑r+\frac{\pi }{4})\hfill & \text{(}r>r_e\text{)}\hfill \\ (\frac{k}{\kappa _{\mathrm{}}(r)})^{\frac{1}{2}}\mathrm{exp}(_r^{r_e}\kappa _{\mathrm{}}(r)𝑑r)\hfill & \text{(}r<r_e\text{)}\hfill \end{array}`$ (19)   
where $`r_e`$ is the external classical turning point, and $`k_{\mathrm{}}`$ and $`\kappa _{\mathrm{}}`$ are the wave numbers for the orbital angular momentum $`\mathrm{}`$ in the classically allowed and forbidden regions, respectively. Notice that $`G_{\mathrm{}}`$ and $`F_{\mathrm{}}`$ increases and decreases exponentially, respectively, as $`r`$ moves deeper inside the tunneling region. We remark that the phase shift $`\alpha `$ in Eq.(8) is proportional to the tunneling probability and is very small. This can be proved by matching the semiclassical wave function under the potential barrier to the wave function in the region of the potential well. We thus express $`\mathrm{tan}\alpha `$ as

$$\mathrm{tan}\alpha =C_\alpha P_{tf},P_{tf}=e^{2_{r_0}^{r_{ef}}\kappa _{1f}(r)𝑑r},$$
(20)   
where $`P_{tf}`$ is the tunneling probability in the final state in the WKB approximation. In Eq.(20) and in what follows, the meaning of the lower indices will be obvious, e.g. $`\kappa _{1f}`$ is the wave number with angular momentum 1 in the final state.

We now derive the semiclassical formulae for the contribution to the integral in Eq.(12) from the tunneling, mixed and outside regions separately.

1. Tunneling region: The main contribution from the tunneling region comes from the $`F_1G_0`$ term, whose semiclassical representation is given by

$`{\displaystyle _{r_0}^{r_{ei}}}A(r)F_1(\eta _f,k_fr)G_0(\eta _i,k_ir)𝑑r{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}\sqrt{k_ik_f}e^{_{r_{ei}}^{r_{ef}}\kappa _{1f}(r)𝑑r}{\displaystyle _{r_0}^{r_{ei}}}A(r)\left({\displaystyle \frac{1}{\kappa _{0i}(r)\kappa _{1f}(r)}}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}e^{_r^{r_{ei}}(\kappa _{1f}(r^{})\kappa _{0i}(r^{}))𝑑r^{}}𝑑r`$ (21)   
$`{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{}\sqrt{k_ik_f}}{2m}}e^{_{r_{ei}}^{r_{ef}}\kappa _{1f}(r)𝑑r}{\displaystyle _0^{T_i}}A(r(\tau _i))\left({\displaystyle \frac{\kappa _{0i}(r(\tau _i))}{\kappa _{1f}(r(\tau _i))}}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}e^{\frac{1}{\mathrm{}}_{\tau _i}^{T_i}(\frac{\mathrm{}^21(1+1)}{2m(r(\tau _i^{}))^2}+\mathrm{}\omega )𝑑\tau _i^{}}𝑑\tau _i`$ (22)   
In obtaining the last expression, we expanded the $`\kappa _{1f}(r)\kappa _{0i}(r)`$ up to the leading order of $`\frac{\mathrm{}^21(1+1)}{2m(r(\tau ^{}))^2}+\mathrm{}\omega `$ and introduced the time parameter along the (imaginary) time axis $`\tau _i`$ by

$$\tau _i(r)=_{r_0}^r\frac{dr}{v_i(r)},v_i(r)=\sqrt{\frac{2}{m}\left(\frac{Z_\alpha Z_De^2}{r}E_i\right)}$$
(23)   
$`T_i=\tau _i(r_{ei})`$ is the tunneling time in the initial channel. The lower index $`i`$ of $`\tau _i`$ shows that the time is related to the distance $`r`$ through the velocity in the initial state. Notice that the radiation amplitude in this region is given by the Laplace transform of the acceleration if one could ignore the centrifugal term. The $`G_1G_0`$ term is the largest as long as the integral itself is concerned. However, the contribution of this term is reduced by the small value of $`\mathrm{tan}\alpha `$ in front of $`G_1`$. We have a similar expression for the $`G_1F_0`$ term, which is also expected to be small. The $`F_1F_0`$ term is expected to be the smallest.

2. Mixed region: The mixed region, which is classically allowed in the initial state but forbidden after radiation, is beyond the scope of classical calculations in Refs. and . Although quantum mechanical calculations are required to quantitatively estimate the contribution from this region as we show later, it is still interesting to see its semiclassical representation. The contribution of the $`F_1`$ term which dominates in this region reads,

$$_{r_{ei}}^{r_{ef}}A(r)F_1(\eta _f,k_fr)R_i(r)𝑑r\frac{1}{2}_{r_{ei}}^{r_{ef}}A(r)\left(\frac{k_ik_f}{k_{0i}(r)\kappa _{1f}(r)}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}e^{i\left[_{r_{ei}}^rk_{0i}(r^{})𝑑r^{}+\frac{\pi }{4}\right]}e^{_r^{r_{ef}}\kappa _{1f}(r^{})𝑑r^{}}𝑑r$$
(24)   
We show later that this region strongly influences the behaviour of the spectral distribution at high energies.

3. Outside the barrier: The main contribution in the classical region, i.e. outside the barrier, comes from the $`F_1`$ term. Its semiclassical expression reads,

$$_{r_{ef}}^{\mathrm{}}A(r)F_1(\eta _f,k_fr)R_i(r)𝑑r\frac{\mathrm{}\sqrt{k_ik_f}}{2im}e^{i_{r_{ei}}^{r_{ef}}k_{0i}(r)𝑑r}_0^{\mathrm{}}A(r(t_f))\left(\frac{k_{1f}(r(t_f))}{k_{0i}(r(t_f))}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}e^{\frac{i}{\mathrm{}}_0^{t_f}(\frac{\mathrm{}^21(1+1)}{2m(r(t_f^{}))^2}+\mathrm{}\omega )𝑑t_f^{}}𝑑t_f$$
(25)   
This is nothing but the classical formula for the bremsstrahlung except for the existence of the centrifugal potential term. The lower index $`f`$ of $`t_f`$ means that the time $`t`$ is related to the distance $`r`$ through the velocity in the final state. We have ignored the term where the action integrals in the initial and final states enter with the same sign, because the sign of the integrand in that case rapidly changes as a function of $`r`$ and the value of integration becomes negligibly small.

We next consider the contribution from the wall. This term has been overlooked in the calculations reported in Ref.. As we clearly demonstrate later, this is one of the key issues to resolve the discrepancy between the calculations in Refs. and . The contribution of the $`F_0`$ term can be safely ignored unless the energy of the $`\alpha `$ particle is very close to the top of the potential barrier. Using Eq.(20), the remaining terms can be expressed as,

$$R_f(r_0)G_0(\eta _i,k_ir_0)\frac{1}{2}\left(\frac{k_fk_i}{\kappa _{1f}(r_0)\kappa _{0i}(r_0)}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\mathrm{cos}\alpha (1+2C_\alpha )e^{_{r_{ei}}^{r_{ef}}\kappa _{1f}(r)𝑑r}e^{\frac{1}{\mathrm{}}_0^{T_i}(\frac{\mathrm{}^21(1+1)}{2m(r(\tau _i))^2}+\mathrm{}\omega )𝑑\tau _i}.$$
(26)   
We now analyse the bremsstrahlung in the $`\alpha `$ decay from <sup>210</sup>Po, where $`E_\alpha `$=5.3 MeV. We determine the potential parameters in the same way as in Ref., i.e. by matching the quantum mechanical wave functions at $`r_0`$, and by calculating the decay width by normalizing the current at $`r_e`$ to the probability inside. An alternative is to use the semiclassical quantization rule and the R-matrix theory for the decay rate (see Eqs.(3) and (4) in Ref.). We found, however, that the semi-classical quantization rule is not valid with significant influences on the bremsstrahlung spectrum (see later).

Figure 1 shows the spectral distribution calculated quantum mechanically with one of the potential parameter sets, $`V_0`$ = 21.37 MeV and $`r_0`$ = 8.055 fm, which gives 5 nodes to the wave function for the radial motion. The general behaviour of the theoretical results do not depend so much on the particular choice of the potential parameters (see below, however). This potential parameter set corresponds to that in Refs.. The thick solid line represents the total photon emission probability. It is a monotonically decreasing function and is consistent with the data except for the last data point. The figure also shows that various components have nearly the same order of magnitude, and that the final spectrum is the result of a complicated interference among them. In order to see the role of tunneling and classical regions and the interplay of each contribution more clearly, we show in Fig.2 specral distributions by dividing into the classical and tunneling contributions. We present two different combinations depending on whether we consider the mixed region classical or tunneling. We call the part containing the outside barrier component the classical. In either case, the soft photon emission is dominated by classical contributions. This follows from the strong cancellation between the wall contribution and the contribution from the integral in the tunneling region. If the potential has a finite slope at the inner turning point and if one could ignore the centrifugal term, the net contribution from the tunneling region should be zero in the soft photon limit. Our result matches with this general aspect. For high energy photons, the classical and the tunneling contributions have nearly the same magnitude and interfere destructively leading to a much smaller photon emission than the the prediction of the classical theory. The dot-dashed line in Fig.2 shows the photon emission probability obtained by summing the contributions from the outside barrier and tunneling regions. Interestingly, this has a hump at high photon energies, just like that discussed in Ref., which overlooked the wall contribution and ignored the contribution from the mixed region. However, this interesting interference pattern is hidden by these contributions.

As well known, the resonance position and the decay width do not uniquely determine the potential. Each potential gives a different value for the coefficient $`C_\alpha `$ in our formalism. An interesting question is then whether the bremsstrahlung can be used to give additional constraints to the potential. If one restricts to the simple square well potential in Eq.(2), various sets correspond to different number of nodes $`n`$ in the radial wave function inside the potential well. We found that the spectral distribution is almost indistinguishable as long as $`n7`$. For larger values of $`n`$, one starts to notice a difference in that the soft photon emission probability is predicted to be recognizably larger than the prediction of the classical theory. Note that the soft photons mean here those whose energy is, say, smaller than 100 keV. The emission probability of zero energy photons is not influenced by the potential parameters as discussed in Ref.. As an example, we show in Fig.3 the spectral distribution calculated by the potential set, $`V_0`$ = 107.3 MeV and $`r_0`$ = 7.947 fm, which corresponds to $`n=11`$ and matches with a simple estimate based on the Pauli principle. In this respect, it would be extremely interesting to extend the data towards lower photon energies to examine whether the shallow or the deep potential agrees better with the data of bremsstrahlung. $`C_\alpha `$ gradually decreases from 0.041 to $``$0.055, and from $``$0.25 to $``$0.28 for the potentials in Figs.1 and 3, respectively, as $`E_\gamma `$ changes from 0 to 600 keV.

We finally comment on the validity of semiclassical calculations. We already mentioned a problem with the semiclassical quantization rule in determining the potential parameters. Since $`C_\alpha `$ is sensitive to the slope of the wave function at the matching point, it causes a serious error in properly describing the bremsstarhlung spectrum. We found that the wall contribution itself gets very small because of the cancellation between the $`F_1`$ and $`G_1`$ terms in Eq.(26) if we adopt any potential set determined by using the semiclassical quantization rule. Consequently, the contribution from the tunneling region dominates the spectrum at soft photons giving larger cross section than the classical prediction. Another problem is that two turning points $`r_{ei}`$ and $`r_{ef}`$ lie too close to each other to use naive semiclassical wave functions. The crosses in Fig.1 represent the contribution from the mixed region calculated semiclassically. The deviation from the dotted line clearly shows the failure of the semiclassical calculations. Since the contribution from the mixed region strongly influences high energy spectrum, this is a serious problem. The semiclassical calculations reproduce the qualitative behaviour of the quantum mechanical results quite well for the contributions from the regions under and outside the barrier, but have some quantitative inaccuracy especially at high energies.

In summary, our analysis shows that the final bremsstrahlung spectrum results from a subtle interferences of the contributions of the tunneling, mixed and classical regions as well as the wall of the the potential well, each of which has a comparable magnitude. Semiclassical as well as classical theories seem not to be reliable for describing these subtle interference effects, though they give some clear understanding of the phenomena. It will be very interesting if one could perform more exclusive experiments to pick up each contribution separately. The extention of data to more soft photon side is awaited to provide a stringent test of the potential between the alpha particle and the daughter nucleus. Our study is based on the assumption of the validity of the potential model. Though this assumption seems to work in our analysis, it is a very interesting question to examine more in detail whether the bremsstrahlung spectrum contains some information beyond the scope of the potential model such as the validity of the R-matrix theory and the preformation factor.

We thank G.F. Bertsch, T. Papenbrock, A. Bulgac, M. Abe and J. Kasagi for discussions. This research was supported by the Monbusho International Scientific Research Program: Joint Research: contract number 09044051; and by Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research, Contract number 08640380 from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. The work of K.H. was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists.

Figure Captions:

Fig. 1:Total photon emission probability and its decomposition. The potential parameters are $`V_0=21.37`$ MeV and $`r_0=8.055`$ fm. The crosses are the mixed region contribution calculated semiclassically. All the other lines have been obtained quantum mechanically. The data are from Ref. .

Fig. 2: Grouping of each component into classical and tunneling contributions. The potential parameters are the same as those for Fig. 1.

Fig. 3:The same as Fig.2, but for $`V_0=107.3`$ MeV and $`r_0=7.947`$ fm.