Induced fission of nuclei: dynamical chaos and lifetime of compound nucleus

A semi-phenomenological theory is proposed to describe the induced fission of heavy nuclei at low and intermediate excitation energies. The theory is based on the concept of the dynamical chaos, arising because of a negative curvature of the n-dimensional potential energy surface (PES). The nuclear fission is treated as a diffusion of the representing point across a vicinity of the saddle point in PES. The diffusion coefficient is calculated for various metrics in PES as an explicit function of the two-dimensional curvatures at the saddle point of PES. The present theory suggests an estimate for the fission time, τf∼10-14 s. Coefficients of nuclear friction and viscosity are also calculated in general, and the resulting numerical estimates are in agreement with the experimental data