Gross theory of β-decay with shell corrections

The gross theory of β-decay of Takahashi et al. is readily applied to the region of heavy and exotic nuclei where the transition matrix-elements are unknown. The overall agreement of the calculated half-lives with the experimentally known ones is fairly satisfactory in contrast to the case of the simple shell model calculations available up to now for heavy nuclei as they cannot take into account the residual interactions: Fully realistic shell-model calculations, which give β-decay half-lives in good agreement with experiments are only available up to the sd-shell nuclei. The author extended the gross theory by taking into account the pairing and shell effects and the selection rules to some extent. These effects only need to be added as corrections since the gross theory already intrinsically carries the load of the residual interactions. (orig./AH)