Fission fragment distributions within time-dependent density functional theory

TL;DR

This paper uses time-dependent density functional theory with particle number projection to accurately predict fission fragment mass and charge distributions in 240Pu, aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining TDHF and double particle number projection to improve fission fragment distribution predictions.

Findings

Charge distributions depend on initial deformation states.

Mass distributions match experimental results after Gaussian kernel smoothing.

Total kinetic energy estimates are consistent with experiments.

Abstract

A notable issue, the proper description of mass and charge distributions of fission fragments within nonadiabatic descriptions of fission dynamics, is investigated by performing double particle number projection on the outcomes of time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) simulation. The induced fission process of the benchmark nucleus 240Pu is studied. In the three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate without any symmetry restrictions, we get the static fission pathway from the two-dimensional potential energy surface, and then the fission dynamics from saddle to scission point are obtained using TDHF. We show that the charge numbers of primary heavy fragments from TDHF simulation strongly depend on the deformations of initial configurations via the two asymmetric fission channels, which can be distinguished according to the dynamical fission trajectories. The charge distribution of fission fragments is well reproduced using the double particle number projection technique. After applying the Gaussian kernel estimation based on the distribution from the double particle number projection technique, the mass distribution is also consistent with the experimental results. Besides, the results of the total kinetic energy of fission fragments are reasonably consistent with the experiments.