There are excellent opportunities to produce excited heavy hyper residues in relativistic hadron and peripheral heavy-ion collisions. We investigate the disintegration of such residues into hyper nuclei via evaporation of baryons and light clusters and their fission. Previously these processes were well known for normal nuclei as the decay channels at low excitation energies. We have generalized these models for the case of hyper-matter. In this way we make extension of nuclear reaction studies at low temperature into the strange sector. We demonstrate how the new decay channels can be integrated in the whole disintegration process. Their importance for mass and isotope distributions of produced hyper-fragments is emphasized. New and exotic isotopes obtained within these processes may provide a unique opportunity for investigating hyperon interaction in nuclear matter.
Fusion-fission dynamics is investigated with a special emphasis on fusion reactions at low energy for which shell effects and pairing correlations can play a crucial role leading in particular to multi-modal fission. To follow the dynamical evolution of an excited and rotating nucleus we solve a 2-dimensional Langevin equation taking explicitly light-particle evaporation into account. The confrontation theory-experiment is demonstrated to give interesting information on the model presented, its qualities as well as its shortcomings.
Fission-related phenomena of heavy $Lambda$ hypernuclei are discussed with the constraint Skyrme-Hartree-Fock+BCS (SHF+BCS) method, in which a similar Skyrme-type interaction is employed also for the interaction between a $Lambda$ particle and a nucleon. Assuming that the $Lambda$ particle adiabatically follows the fission motion, we discuss the fission barrier height of $^{239}_{Lambda}$U. We find that the fission barrier height increases slightly when the $Lambda$ particle occupies the lowest level. In this case, the $Lambda$ particle is always attached to the heavier fission fragment. This indicates that one may produce heavy neutron-rich $Lambda$ hypernuclei through fission, whose weak decay is helpful for the nuclear transmutation of long-lived fission products. We also discuss cases where the $Lambda$ particle occupies a higher single-particle level.
The dynamics of exotic hypernuclei in heavy-ion collisions has been investigated thoroughly with a microscopic transport model. All possible channels on hyperon ($Lambda$, $Sigma$ and $Xi$) production near threshold energies are implemented in the transport model. The light complex fragments (Z$leq$2) are constructed with the Wigner-function method. The classical phase-space coalescence is used for recognizing heavy nuclear and hyperfragments and the statistical model is taken for describing the decay process. The nuclear fragmentation reactions of the available experimental data from the ALADIN collaboration are well reproduced by the combined approach. It is found that the in-medium potentials of strange particles influence the strangeness production and fragment formation. The hyperfragments are mainly created in the projectile or target-like rapidity region and the yields are reduced about the 3-order magnitude in comparison to the nuclear fragments. The hypernuclear dynamics of HypHI data is well described with the model. The possible experiments for producing the neutron-rich hyperfragments at the high-intensity heavy-ion accelerator facility (HIAF) are discussed.
An electron localization measure was originally introduced to characterize chemical bond structures in molecules. Recently, a nucleon localization based on Hartree-Fock densities has been introduced to investigate $alpha$-cluster structures in light nuclei. Compared to the local nucleonic densities, the nucleon localization function has been shown to be an excellent indicator of shell effects and cluster correlations. Using the spatial nucleon localization measure, we investigate the emergence of fragments in fissioning heavy nuclei. To illustrate basic concepts of nucleon localization, we employ the self-consistent energy density functional method with a quantified energy density functional optimized for fission studies. We study the particle densities and spatial nucleon localization distributions along the fission pathways of $^{264}$Fm, $^{232}$Th and $^{240}$Pu. We demonstrate that the fission fragments are formed fairly early in the evolution, well before scission. We illustrate the usefulness of the localization measure by showing how the hyperdeformed state of $^{232}$Th can be understood in terms of a quasimolecular state made of $^{132}$Sn and $^{100}$Zr fragments. Compared to nucleonic distributions, the nucleon localization function more effectively quantifies nucleonic clustering: its characteristic oscillating pattern, traced back to shell effects, is a clear fingerprint of cluster/fragment configurations. This is of particular interest for studies of fragment formation and fragment identification in fissioning nuclei.
Within a combined approach we investigate the main features of the production of hyper-fragments in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The formation of hyperons is modelled within the UrQMD and HSD transport codes. To describe the hyperon capture by nucleons and nuclear residues a coalescence of baryons (CB) model was developed. We demonstrate that the origin of hypernuclei of various masses can be explained by typical baryon interactions, and that it is similar to processes leading to the production of conventional nuclei. At high beam energies we predict a saturation of the yields of all hyper-fragments, therefore, this kind of reactions can be studied with high yields even at the accelerators of moderate relativistic energies.