Stability of superheavy nuclei against α-decay and spontaneous fission

The stability of superheavy nuclei is mainly determined by the competition between α-decay and spontaneous fission. We investigate the half-lives of both α-decay and spontaneous fission for the heaviest nuclei with proton numbers up to image. The agreement between theoretical half-lives and available experimental data is fairly well for the superheavy nuclei. Enhanced stability against spontaneous fission is found for the image and image isotopic chains, which are of current experimental interests. α-Decay is predicted to be the dominating decay mode for the image and image isotopes with estimated half-lives ranging from microseconds to milliseconds.