Dependence of Fission-Fragment Properties On Excitation Energy For Neutron-Rich Actinides

Abstract

Experimental access to full isotopic fragment distributions is very important to determine the features of the fission process. However, the isotopic identification of fission fragments has been, in the past, partial and scarce. A solution based on the use of inverse kinematics to study transfer-induced fission of exotic actinides was carried out at GANIL, resulting in the first experiment accessing the full identification of a collection of fissioning systems and their corresponding fission fragment distribution. In these experiments, a 238U beam at 6.14 AMeV impinged on a carbon target to produce fissioning systems from U to Am by transfer reactions, and Cf by fusion reactions. Isotopic fission yields of 250Cf, 244Cm, 240Pu, 239Np and 238U are presented in this work. With this information, the average number of neutrons as a function of the atomic number of the fragments is calculated, which reflects the impact of nuclear structure around Z=50, N=80 on the production of fission fragments. The characteristics of the Super Long, Standard I, Standard II, and Standard III fission channels were extracted from fits of the fragment yields for different ranges of excitation energy. The position and contribution of the fission channels as function of excitation energy are presented.