No Arabic abstract
Fissioning nuclei and fission fragments, nuclear fragments emerging from energetic collisions, or nuclei probed with various external fields can emit one or more pre-equilibrium neutrons, protons, and potentially other heavier nuclear fragments. I describe a formalism which can be used to evaluate the pre-equilibrium neutron emission probabilities and the excitation energies of the remnant fragments.
According to the driving potential of a fissile system, we propose a phenomenological fission potential for a description of the pre-neutron emission mass distributions of neutron-induced actinide fission. Based on the nucleus-nucleus potential with the Skyrme energy-density functional, the driving potential of the fissile system is studied considering the deformations of nuclei. The energy dependence of the potential parameters is investigated based on the experimental data for the heights of the peak and valley of the mass distributions. The pre-neutron emission mass distributions for reactions 238U(n, f), 237Np(n, f), 235U(n, f), 232Th(n, f) and 239Pu(n, f) can be reasonably well reproduced. Some predictions for these reactions at unmeasured incident energies are also presented.
Several sources of angular anisotropy for fission fragments and prompt neutrons have been studied in neutron-induced fission reactions. These include kinematic recoils of the target from the incident neutron beam and the fragments from the emission of the prompt neutrons, preferential directions of the emission of the fission fragments with respect to the beam axis due to the population of particular transition states at the fission barrier, and forward-peaked angular distributions of pre-equilibrium neutrons which are emitted before the formation of a compound nucleus. In addition, there are several potential sources of angular anisotropies that are more difficult to disentangle: the angular distributions of prompt neutrons from fully accelerated fragments or from scission neutrons, and the emission of neutrons from fission fragments that are not fully accelerated. In this work, we study the effects of the first group of anisotropy sources, particularly exploring the correlations between the fission fragment anisotropy and the resulting neutron anisotropy. While kinematic effects were already accounted for in our Hauser-Feshbach Monte Carlo code, $mathtt{CGMF}$, anisotropic angular distributions for the fission fragments and pre-equilibrium neutrons resulting from neutron-induced fission on $^{233,234,235,238}$U, $^{239,241}$Pu, and $^{237}$Np have been introduced for the first time. The effects of these sources of anisotropy are examined over a range of incident neutron energies, from thermal to 20 MeV, and compared to experimental data from the Chi-Nu liquid scintillator array. The anisotropy of the fission fragments is reflected in the anisotropy of the prompt neutrons, especially as the outgoing energy of the prompt neutrons increases, allowing for an extraction of the fission fragment anisotropy to be made from a measurement of the neutrons.
Starting from a Skyrme interaction with tensor terms, the $beta$-decay rates of $^{52}$Ca have been studied within a microscopic model including the $2p-2h$ configuration effects. We observe a redistribution of the strength of Gamow-Teller transitions due to the $2p-2h$ fragmentation. Taking into account this effect results in a satisfactory description of the neutron emission probability of the $beta$-decay in $^{52}$Ca.
On the occasion of the $75^{th}$ anniversary of the fission phenomenon, we present a surprisingly simple result which highlights the important role of isospin and its conservation in neutron rich fission fragments. We have analysed the fission fragment mass distribution from two recent heavy-ion reactions $^{238}$U($^{18}$O,f) and $^{208}$Pb($^{18}$O,f) as well as a thermal neutron fission reaction $^{245}$Cm(n$^{th}$,f). We find that the conservation of the total isospin explains the overall trend in the observed relative yields of fragment masses in each fission pair partition. The isospin values involved are very large making the effect dramatic. The findings open the way for more precise calculations of fission fragment distributions in heavy nuclei and may have far reaching consequences for the drip line nuclei, HI fusion reactions, and calculation of decay heat in the fission phenomenon.
We discuss the sensitivity of fission barrier for heavy neutron-rich nuclei to fission paths in the two dimensional neutron-proton quadrupole plane. To this end, we use the constrained Skyrme-Hartree-Fock + BCS method, and examine the difference of fission barriers obtained with three constraining operators, that is, the neutron, proton, and mass quadrupole operators. We investigate $^{220}$U, $^{236}$U, and $^{266}$U, %from proton-rich to neutron-rich uranium isotopes, that is relevant to r-process nucleosynthesis. We find that the fission barrier heights are almost the same among the three constraining operators even for neutron-rich nuclei, indicating that the usual way to calculate fission barriers with the mass quadrupole operator is well justified. We also discuss the difference between proton and neutron deformation parameters along the fission paths.