From Asymmetric to Symmetric Fission in the Fermium Isotopes within the Time-Dependent GCM Formalism

Abstract

Predicting the properties of neutron-rich nuclei far from the valley of stability is one of the major challenges of modern nuclear theory. In heavy and superheavy nuclei, a difference of only a few neutrons is sufficient to change the dominant fission mode. A theoretical approach capable of predicting such rapid transitions for neutron-rich systems would be a valuable tool to better understand r-process nucleosynthesis or the decay of super-heavy elements. In this work, we investigate for the first time the transition from asymmetric to symmetric fission through the calculation of primary fission yields with the time-dependent generator coordinate method (TDGCM). We choose here the transition in neutron-rich Fermium isotopes, which was the first to be observed experimentally in the late seventies and is often used as a benchmark for theoretical studies. We compute the primary fission fragment mass and charge yields for 254 Fm, 256 Fm and 258 Fm from the TDGCM under the Gaussian overlap approximation. The static part of the calculation (generation of a potential energy surface) consists in a series of constrained Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov calculations based on the D1S, D1M or D1N parameterizations of the Gogny effective interaction in a two-center harmonic oscillator basis. The 2-dimensional dynamics in the collective space spanned by the quadrupole and octupole moments is then computed with the finite element solver FELIX-2.0. The available experimental data and the TDGCM post-dictions are consistent and agree especially on the position in the Fermium isotopic chain at which the transition occurs. The main limitation of the method lies in the presence of discontinuities in the 2-dimensional manifold of generator states.

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