Advances in fission and spontaneous emission of heavy particles from nuclei

Heavy Ion Radioactivities were predicted in 1980, four years before the first experimental evidence. Recently performed measurements of cluster decay modes, showing a good agreement with calculated half-lives within analytical superasymmetric fission model, are included in a comprehensive half-life systematics from which other possible candidates for future experiments may be obtained. A new method allowing to find general reflection asymmetric equilibrium (saddle-point) nuclear shapes by solving an integro-differential equation is presented. (author)