ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the proceeding chapters of this book. The real progress has been made in understanding of various decay modes of atomic nuclei, both from an experimental and a theoretical point of view. A rich body of data on atomic masses, the structure of nuclei far off the beta stability, and the reaction mechanisms was collected by studying processes in various new regions of the nuclear chart and by discovering new phenomena. By extending a relativistic Lorentz-invariant formalism used in particle physics, shows that the shell effects observed in the emission rates are manifested in both kinematics and dynamics. In this way larger classes of phenomena, including spontaneous emission of elementary particles, descibes in a unified manner. From a systematic study of spontaneous fission properties of transuranium nuclei, particularly half-lives, fragment mass and kinetic energy distributions, new insight had been gained in the physics of this phenomenon.
