Quasi-free (p,2p) reactions in inverse kinematics for studying the fission yield dependence on temperature

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel experimental approach using inverse kinematics and quasi-free (p,2p) reactions to study how nuclear fission yields depend on temperature, providing new insights into the complex fission process.

Contribution

It introduces a new experimental method combining inverse kinematics and quasi-free scattering to analyze fission yield dependence on temperature.

Findings

Preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of the method.

The approach allows reconstruction of excitation energy of fissioning nuclei.

Full isotopic identification of fission fragments was achieved.

Abstract

Despite the recent experimental and theoretical progress in the investigation of the nuclear fission process, a complete description still represents a challenge in nuclear physics because it is a very complex dynamical process, whose description involves the coupling between intrinsic and collective degrees of freedom, as well as different quantum-mechanical phenomena. To improve on the existing data on nuclear fission, we produce fission reactions of heavy nuclei in inverse kinematics by using quasi-free (p,2p) scattering, which induce fission through particle-hole excitations that can range from few to ten's of MeV. The measurement of the four-momenta of the two outgoing protons allows to reconstruct the excitation energy of the fissioning compound nucleus and therefore to study the evolution of the fission yields with temperature. The realization of this kind of experiment requires a complex experimental setup, providing full isotopic identification of both fission fragments and an accurate measurement of the momenta of the two outgoing protons. This was realized recently at the GSI/FAIR facility and here some preliminary results are presented.