Violent Nuclear Reactions: Large-Amplitude Nuclear Dynamic Phenomena in Fermionic Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores the complex, non-equilibrium dynamics of violent nuclear reactions, emphasizing the importance of correlations, fluctuations, and transport phenomena in understanding outcomes like fusion and cluster formation.

Contribution

It develops a microscopic, non-equilibrium framework incorporating correlations and fluctuations to describe large-amplitude nuclear dynamics in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Large-amplitude fluctuations lead to bifurcations in reaction mechanisms.

Correlations and phase-space fluctuations are crucial for accurate modeling.

The approach successfully reproduces experimental observables.

Abstract

Violent nuclear collisions are open systems which require a non-equilibrium description when the process should be followed from the first instants. The heated system produced in the collision, can no more be treated within an independent-particle picture and additional correlations should be taken into account: they rely to in-medium dissipation and phase-space fluctuations. Their interplay with the one-body collective behaviour activates the transport dynamics: large-amplitude fluctuations and bifurcations in a variety of mechanisms appear, from fusion to neck formation till eventually freezing out the system into several intermediate-mass clusters. Starting from fundamental concepts tested on nuclear matter, a microscopic description is built up to address violent processes occurring in heavy-ion collisions at Fermi energies and in spallation reactions, and it is applied to experimental observables.