Fission Fragments Binary Brake-Up at Crossing of the Carbon Foil

Abstract

A time-of-flight spectrometer was used to compare the masses of nuclear fission fragments before and after their passage through the carbon foil, event by event. For all the registered fragments, there was a significant loss of mass of the fragment, and the registered fragment-residue turned out to be a magic nucleus. For spontaneous fission of 252Cf nuclei, the effect was observed for both light and heavy mass peaks. This gives grounds to assume that the fragment of the conventional binary fission is born in the shape isomer state, which looks like a di-nuclear system consisting of a magical core and a light cluster.