Study of the neutron-photon competition during fission fragment de-excitation

A program was developed to study in detail the competition between neutron and photon emissions during the different stages of the nucleus de-excitation. The main conclusions of this work are the following: the neutron-photon competition fairly depends of the initial spin of the primary fragment. It has a strong effect on the mean number of emitted neutrons, on the photon energy, and to a lower degree, on the mean energy per neutron. A relation between the mean initial spin of the heavy fragment for the almost symmetrical fission, the mean initial spin of the heavy fragment for a very asymmetric fission and the corresponding values of the mean number of emitted neutrons is given. The mean initial excitation energy must increase of about 9MeV for the nucleus to emit one more neutron. Two reasons are given to explain the fact that the measured neutron multiplicity variance is higher for the heavy fragment than for the light one: either the existence of a covariance between spin and excitation energy distribution, or a dispersion of the values of the mean number of emitted neutrons due to the mass and charge distribution resulting from experimental incertitudes. The mean energy per neutron calculated with the program is in good agreement with measured values