New results from three-dimensional TDHF

Abstract

In the late 70’s the time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) approximation originally proposed by Bonche, Koonin, and Negele [1] was used in a number of studies of heavy-ion collisions. These calculations yielded a lot of insight into the reaction dynamics, explaining such phenomena as neck formation and neck rapture and the collective excitations of the fragments in a natural way. There were a number of limitations, however, which decreased interest in the method: while the energy losses in deep-inelastic reactions could be understood semiquantitatively, there was insufficient energy loss for central collisions, leading to a window of deep-inelastic reactions at small angular momenta within the fusion region. This raised the question of whether two-body collisions can be neglected. Also, because of computer limitations at that time, most calculations were done in axial symmetry and the spin-orbit coupling could not be included. In later work, a limited exploration of TDHF with spin-orbit coupling seemed to indicate that this may provide sufficient additional dissipation. We believe that present computer capabilities are sufficient to use TDHF in fully three-dimensional geometry and including the spin-orbit force. This will for the first time allow the investigation of collisions of deformed nuclei. The theory will be explained and first results for collisions of deformed light nuclei will be presented.