Fission mode identification in the 180Hg region: derivative analysis approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a derivative analysis method to identify fission modes in the 180Hg region, improving interpretation of experimental data with limited resolution and statistics.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel derivative analysis approach that reliably identifies fission modes from limited-resolution and low-statistics experimental data.

Findings

Method effectively distinguishes fission modes in simulated data.

Approach yields consistent results even with dominant symmetric fission.

Works well on real experimental data with limited events.

Abstract

Experimental setups commonly used to study fission properties of nuclei in the exotic neutron-deficient 180Hg region are based on the time-of-flight technique for the fission-product identification. The nuclei of interest are created via fusion reactions at excitation energies of several tens of MeV and identified with limited mass resolution. The deduced final fission-fragment mass distributions are in general structureless, which makes the identification of fission modes, along with their properties, ambiguous and author-dependent. The standard functional-analysis technique applied to the simulated limited-resolution fusion-fission data appears to provide consistent results on the number and parameters of fission modes, even in cases of strong symmetric-mode dominance, i.e. for Gaussian-like fission-fragment mass distribution shapes. The method is shown to work also on data sets with limited statistics (real experimental data with integral of a few tens of thousands of events).