Microscopic dynamical description of proton-induced fission with the constrained molecular dynamics model

Abstract

The microscopic description of nuclear fission still remains a topic of intense basic research. Un- derstanding nuclear fission, apart from a theoretical point of view, is of practical importance for energy production and the transmutation of nuclear waste. In nuclear astrophysics, fission sets the upper limit to the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements via the r-process. In this work we initiated a systematic study of intermediate energy proton-induced fission using the Constrained Molecu- lar Dynamics (CoMD) code. The CoMD code implements an effective interaction with a nuclear matter compressibility of K=200 (soft EOS) with several forms of the density dependence of the nucleon-nucleon symmetry potential. Moreover, a constraint is imposed in the phase-space occu- pation for each nucleon restoring the Pauli principle at each time step of the collision. A proper choice of the surface parameter of the effective interaction has been made to describe fission. In this work, we present results of fission calculations for proton-induced reactions on : a) 232 Th at 27 and 63 MeV, b) 235 U at 10, 30, 60 and 100 MeV, and c) 238 U at 100 and 660 MeV. The calculated observables include fission-fragment mass distributions, total fission energies, neutron multiplicities and fission times. These observables are compared to available experimental data. We show that the microscopic CoMD code is able to describe the complicated many-body dynamics of the fission process at intermediate and high energy and give a reasonable estimate of the fission time scale. Sensitivity of the results to the density dependence of the nucleon symmetry potential (and, thus, the nuclear symmetry energy) is found. Further improvements of the code are necessary to achieve a satisfactory description of low energy fission in which shell effects play a dominant role.