Complete kinematics studies of fission reactions induced by quasi-free nucleon scattering collisions

Abstract

Measurements of spallation, fragmentation and Coulomb-induced fission reactions in inverse kinematics have provided valuable data in the last decades to accurately investigate the fission dynamics and nuclear structure at large deformations of a large variety of stable and non-stable heavy nuclei. To go further, quasi-free scattering (QFS) reactions in inverse kinematics are proposed as a new surrogate method to induce fission, which allows to reconstruct the excitation energy of compound fissioning systems by using the four-momenta of the two outgoing nucleons. This new approach would permit therefore to correlate the excitation energy with the charge and mass distributions of the fission fragments and with the fission probabilities, given for the first time direct access to the simultaneous measurement of the fission yield dependence on temperature and fission barrier heights of exotic heavy nuclei, respectively. The first experiment based on this approach was recently performed at the GSI/FAIR facility and a description of the methodology based on model calculations is given here.