Our 50-year odyssey with fission: Summary

On the occasion of this International Conference on Fifty Years Research in Nuclear Fission, we summarize our present understanding of the fission process and the challenges that lie ahead. The basic properties of fission arise from a delicate competition between disruptive Coulomb forces, cohesive nuclear forces, and fluctuating shell and pairing forces. These static forces are primarily responsible for such experimental phenomena as deformed ground-state nuclear shapes, fission into fragments of unequal size, sawtooth neutron yields, spontaneously fissioning isomers, broad resonances and narrow intermediate structure in fission cross sections, and cluster radioactivity. However, inertial and dissipative forces also play decisive roles in the dynamical evolution of a fissioning nucleus. The energy dissipated between the saddle and scission points is small for low initial excitation energy at the saddle point and increases with increasing excitation energy. At moderate excitation energies, the dissipation of collective energy into internal single-particle excitation energy proceeds largely through the interaction of nucleons with the mean field and with each other in the vicinity of the nuclear surface, as well as through the transfer of nucleons between the two portions of the evolving dumbell-like system. These unique dissipation mechanisms arise from the Pauli exclusion principle for fermions and the details of the nucleon-nucleon interaction, which make the mean free path of a nucleon near the Fermi surface at low excitation energy longer than the nuclear radius. With its inverse process of heavy-ion fusion reactions, fission continues to yield surprises in the study of large-amplitude collective nuclear motion. 87 refs., 12 figs