The two-potential approach to one-proton emission

Proton decay half-lives can be calculated reliably using the idea of simple tunnelling probabilities within a WKB model. Just as simple, but much more intuitive is the approach of Gurvitz and Kalbermann of splitting the tunnelling potential into internal (bound state) and external (scattering state) parts. This is referred to as the Two-Potential approach to the tunnelling problem. For spherical nuclei there is not much to choose between TPA and WKB, but to extract reliable spectroscopic information from the dripline nuclei of interest, these methods must be extended to deformed potentials. We outline our approach for the case of spherical nuclei starting from a mean field HF potential using the Skyrme interaction and outline a programme of work leading to an extended 3-D TPA model