Comprehensive investigation of fission yields by using spallation- and (p,2p)-induced fission reactions in inverse kinematics

TL;DR

This paper explores a novel method using (p,2p) reactions in inverse kinematics to measure fission yields, enabling detailed analysis of excitation energy effects on fission fragment distributions in heavy nuclei.

Contribution

It introduces a new experimental approach to study fission by correlating excitation energy with fragment distributions using (p,2p) reactions in inverse kinematics.

Findings

First experimental implementation at GSI/FAIR.

Potential to measure fission yield dependence on temperature.

Allows direct access to fission barrier effects.

Abstract

In the last decades, measurements of spallation, fragmentation and Coulex induced fission reactions in inverse kinematics have provided valuable data to accurately investigate the fission dynamics and nuclear structure at large deformations of a large variety of stable and non-stable heavy nuclei. To go a step further, we propose now to induce fission by the use of quasi-free (p,2p) scattering reactions in inverse kinematics, which allows us to reconstruct the excitation energy of the compound fissioning system by using the four-momenta of the two outgoing protons. Therefore, this new approach might permit to correlate the excitation energy with the charge and mass distributions of the fission fragments and with the fission probabilities, given for the first time direct access to the simultaneous measurement of the fission yield dependence on temperature and fission barrier heights of exotic heavy nuclei, respectively. The first experiment based on this methodology was realized recently at the GSI/FAIR facility and a detailed description of the experimental setup is given here.