Isospin Conservation in Neutron Rich Systems of Heavy Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that isospin remains a valid quantum number in heavy, neutron-rich nuclei, supported by calculations of fission fragment distributions that align well with experimental data, challenging previous assumptions about isospin mixing.

Contribution

The study provides the first direct experimental evidence of isospin conservation in heavy, neutron-rich nuclei through detailed fission fragment distribution analysis.

Findings

Isospin remains a good quantum number in heavy neutron-rich nuclei.

Calculated fission fragment distributions agree with experimental data.

Supports the importance of neutron richness in preserving isospin.

Abstract

It is generally believed that isospin would diminish in its importance as we go towards heavy mass region due to isospin mixing caused by the growing Coulomb forces. However, it was realized quite early that isospin could become an important and useful quantum number for all nuclei including heavy nuclei due to neutron richness of the systems~\cite{robson}. Lane and Soper~\cite{lane} also showed in a theoretical calculation that isospin indeed remains quite good in heavy mass neutron rich systems. In this paper, we present isospin based calculations~\cite{jain,swati} for the fission fragment distributions obtained from heavy-ion fusion fission reactions. We discuss in detail the procedure adopted to assign the isospin values and the role of neutron multiplicity data in obtaining the total fission fragment distributions. We show that the observed fragment distributions can be reproduced rather reasonably well by the calculations based on the idea of conservation of isospin. This is probably the very first direct experimental evidence of the validity of isospin in heavy nuclei, which arises largely due to the neutron-rich nature of heavy nuclei and their fragments. This result may eventually become useful for the theories of nuclear fission and also in other practical applications.