Quantum Entanglement in Nuclear Fission

TL;DR

This paper investigates the role of quantum entanglement in nuclear fission, demonstrating its influence on energy distribution and neutron multiplicities through microscopic dynamical calculations.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of quantum entanglement effects in nuclear fission, highlighting their importance in energy partitioning and particle correlations.

Findings

Entanglement affects the sawtooth pattern of fragment excitation energies.

Quantum entanglement influences neutron multiplicity distributions.

Steep slopes in particle-number projections can be mitigated by fluctuations.

Abstract

Nuclear fission presents a unique example of quantum entanglement in strongly interacting many-body systems. A heavy nucleus can split into hundreds of combinations of two complementary fragments in the fission process. The entanglement of fragment wave functions is persistent even after separation and impacts the partition of particles and energies between fragments. Based on microscopic dynamical calculations of the fission of $^{240}$Pu, this work finds that quantum entanglement is indispensable in the appearance of sawtooth distributions of average excitation energies of fragments and thus neutron multiplicities, but not in average neuron excess of fragments. Both sawtooth slopes from particle-number projections are found to be steep -- a feature which can be alleviated by random fluctuations. These findings may impact the understanding of quantum entanglement more broadly in mesoscopic systems.