Neutron emission from near super-heavy nuclei ²⁵⁶Rf

For last few decades, topic of synthesis of super-heavy elements (SHE) is of great concern in nuclear physics. A fair understanding of fusion-evaporation and fusion-fission (FF) dynamics is necessary as it helps in exploring the different combinations of target and projectile to maximize the formation probability of super-heavy nuclei. It is a well established fact that for these heavy elements, there is a significant contribution from quasi-fission (QF) processes along with FF processes. Presence of QF hinders the fusion of heavy nuclei and reduces the fusion cross-sections to pico-barn levels. To disentangle these processes, a large number of reaction probes such as fission fragment angular distribution, mass distribution (MD), mass-energy distribution (MED) and mass-gated neutron multiplicity have been used. As we go for heavier and heavier mass region, MD and MED are not sufficient to distinguish the above two components in the fission path of heavy elements as mass symmetric region may be populated by both FF and QF processes. Neutron emission is one of the useful probes for measurements of the time-scales of these processes and it also helps in understanding the mechanism of energy dissipation in heavy-ion reactions. Recently, it was shown that the neutron multiplicity is lower for the QF processes as compared to the neutron multiplicity for the FF processes