Speeding of α Decay in Strong Laser Fields

An extremely high-intensity laser interaction with a nucleus that is undergoing spontaneous -decay is investigated in the framework of the time-dependent one-body Schrödinger equation solved by a Crank-Nicolson scheme associated with transparent boundary conditions. The wave-packet dynamics are determined for various laser intensities and frequencies for continuous waves and for sequences of few-cycle pulses. We show that pulse sequences containing an odd number of half-cycles determine an enhancement of the tunneling probability and therefore a drastic decrease of alpha half-lives compared to the field-free case and the continuous wave case.