Towards Improved Evaluation of Neutron-Induced Fission Cross Section

Abstract

Mean-field calculations can nowadays provide all the nuclear ingredients required to describe the fission path from the equilibrium deformation up to the nuclear scission point. The information obtained from microscopic mean-field models has been included in reaction codes to improve the predictions of neutron-induced fission cross section. The nuclear inputs concern not only the details of the energy surface along the fission path, but also the coherent estimate of the nuclear level density derived within the combinatorial approach on the basis of the same single-particle properties, in particular at the fission saddle points. The predictive power of such a microscopic approach is tested. It is also shown that the various inputs can be tuned to reproduce at best experimental data in one unique coherent framework, so that it is now possible to make reliable and accurate fission cross-section calculations on the basis of microscopic models, but also to use such approaches to estimate the corresponding modeling uncertainties for nuclei, energy ranges or reaction channels for which no data exist.