Microscopic description of the fission process

Full text: We carry out a programmatic study of the fission process in nuclei, based on the nuclear density functional theory and its extensions. Our principal goal is to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the nuclear fission process by taking advantage of state-of-the-art theoretical techniques, going far beyond the existing mean-field methods, and advanced computational tools. In this presentation, I will outline a methodology — based on the multi-dimensional minimization of collective action for fission combined with stochastic Langevin dynamics — to calculate microscopically mass and charge distributions of spontaneous fission yields. In the second part, I will study the emergence of fragments in fissioning heavy nuclei using the spatial nucleon localization measure. (author)