Test of Isospin Conservation in Thermal Neutron-induced Fission of $^{245}$Cm

TL;DR

This study tests the validity of isospin conservation in thermal neutron-induced fission of $^{245}$Cm, demonstrating that isospin can effectively predict fission fragment distributions in neutron-rich systems.

Contribution

The paper extends the application of isospin conservation to thermal neutron-induced fission, successfully reproducing experimental fragment distributions and predicting unmeasured distributions.

Findings

Isospin conservation accurately reproduces known fragment distributions.

Predicted distributions for unmeasured symmetric and heavy fragments.

Supports isospin as a useful quantum number in neutron-rich nuclei.

Abstract

We have, recently, shown that the general trends of partition-wise fission fragment mass distribution in heavy ion (HI) induced compound nuclear (CN) fission of heavy nuclei can be reproduced reasonably well by using the concept of isospin conservation, hence providing a direct evidence of isospin conservation in neutron-rich systems [1, 2, 3, 4]. In this paper, we test the concept of isospin conservation to reproduce the fission fragment mass distribution emerging from thermal neutron-induced CN fission reaction, 245Cm(nth, f). As earlier, we use Kelson's conjectures [5] to assign isospin to neutron-rich fragments emitted in fission, which suggest the formation of fission fragments in Isobaric Analog states (IAS). We calculate the relative yields of neutron-rich fragments using the concept of isospin conservation and basic isospin algebra. The calculated results reproduce quite well the experimentally known partition wise mass distributions. This highlights the usefulness of isospin as an approximately good quantum number in neutron-rich nuclei. This also allows us to predict the fragment distribution of the most symmetric Cd-Cd partition and the heavier mass fragment distributions, both not measured so far.