Modelling of dissipation in nuclear fission

Peripheral heavy-ion collisions at relativistic energy are proposed as a new experimental approach dedicated to nuclear dissipation studies and, in particular, to investigate transient effects which are responsible for the inhibition of fission at the beginning of the process. To extract reliable information from the data, an analytical approximation of the time-dependent fission decay width is used in connection with new experimental signatures of relaxation effects. (author)