Kinetic Energy Distribution of Fragments for Thermal Neutron-Induced $^{235}$U and $^{239}$Pu Fission Reactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Dinuclear and Statistical Model (DSM) to describe the kinetic energy distribution of primary fission fragments in thermal neutron-induced fission of $^{235}$U and $^{239}$Pu, aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

The paper presents a new DSM framework that explicitly models primary fragment kinetic energies using minimal phenomenological parameters, improving understanding of fission fragment energy distributions.

Findings

The model accurately reproduces measured kinetic energy distributions.

Explicit expressions for Coulomb repulsion-driven kinetic energies are derived.

The approach is applicable to various actinide fission reactions.

Abstract

Focused on the generation and evolution of vast complementary pairs of the primary fission fragments at scission moment, Dinuclear and Statistical Model (DSM) is proposed. (1) It is assumed that the fissile nucleus elongates along a symmetric coaxis until it breaks into two primary fission fragments. (2) Every complementary pair of the primary fission fragments is approximatively described as two ellipsoids with large deformation at scission moment. (3) The kinetic energy in every complementary pair of the primary fragments is mainly provided by Coulomb repulsion, which is explicitly expressed through strict six-dimensional integrals. (4) Only three phenomenological coefficients are obtained to globally describe the quadrupole deformation parameters of arbitrary primary fragments both for $^{235}$U($n_{th}, f$) and $^{239}$Pu($n_{th}, f$) reactions, on the basis of the common characteristics of the measured data, such as mass and charge distributions, kinetic energy distributions. In the framework of DSM, the explicit average total kinetic energy distribution $\overline{TKE}(A)$ and the average kinetic energy distribution $\overline{KE}(A)$ are consistently represented. The theoretical results in this paper agree well with the experimental data. Furthermore, this model is expected as the reliable approach to generally evaluate the corresponding observebles for thermal neutron-induced fission of actinides.