Chinese Academy of Sciences It is always exciting to find new isotopes with extreme neutron/proton numbers in nuclear physics research. In the region of heavy nuclei, α-decay is one of the pervasive decay modes and plays an essential role in searching for new isotopes. However, even after about a century of studying α-decay, scientists still cannot perfectly describe how the α-particle is formed at the surface of the nucleus before its emission. In the α-decay process, the α-particle can be regarded not only as two protons plus two neutrons, but also as two proton-neutron pairs. Although previous studies have proved the importance of the pairing forces between the identical nucleons, it remains unclear whether the strong proton-neutron interactions have an impact on α-decay properties, especially in the heavy nuclear region.