Nuclear fission and fusion in a random-walk model

TL;DR

This paper presents an extended random-walk model to describe nuclear fission and fusion processes, including fragment energies, neutron emission, and mode dependencies, enhancing understanding of nuclear shape evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive random-walk model that simulates kinetic energy, neutron emission, and fission modes in nuclear fission and fusion, extending previous models.

Findings

Model successfully predicts fragment kinetic energies and neutron emissions.

Fission modes vary with nuclear energy and are nucleus-dependent.

Application to superheavy element synthesis demonstrates model's versatility.

Abstract

This dissertation deals with theoretical descriptions of nuclear fission and synthesis of superheavy elements via fusion. The associated shape evolutions are treated using a random-walk approach where both the potential energy and the nuclear level density influence the dynamics. The work in this thesis extends the random-walk model by, in addition to the previous description of fragment mass yields, also simulating how much kinetic energy the fission-fragments obtain and the number of neutrons they emit, as well as how these two quantities are correlated. The thesis also presents studies of how different ways of fissioning, called fission modes, are present in different nuclei and how the presence of these modes depends on the energy of the system. The model is furthermore applied to the description of the shape evolution in fusion for production of superheavy elements.