True ternary fission of 252Cf(sf), the collinear decay into fragments of similar size

Abstract

The ternary decay in 252Cf(sf, fff), with three cluster fragments of different masses (e.g.132Sn,52-48Ca,68-72Ni), has been observed by the FOBOS group in JINR. This work has established a new decay mode of heavy nuclei, the collinear cluster tripartition, (CCT). This "true ternary fission" of heavy nuclei has been predicted many times in theoretical works during the last decades. In the present report we discuss true ternary fission (FFF) into three nuclei of almost equal size (e.g. Z=98 → Zi = 32, 34, 32) and other fission modes in the same system. The possible fission channels for 252 Cf(sf) are predicted from potential-energy (PES) calculations. These PES's show pronounced minima for several ternary fragmentation decays, suggesting a variety of collinear ternary fission modes. The FFF-decays have very similar dynamical features as the previously observed collinear CCT-decays, the central fragment has very small kinetic energy. The data of the cited experiment allow the extraction of the yield for some FFF-decays, by using specific gates on the measured parameters.