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Karl-Heinz Schmidt
Signatures of shell effects in nuclear fission Fission-fragment yields and kinetic energies show very pronounced structures due to shell effects in the potential-energy landscape of the fissioning nucleus. The GSI experiment allowed for the first time to study this structure as a function of proton and neutron number of the fissioning nucleus in a systematic way in a particularly interesting region on the chart of the nuclides. Around 226Th, the single-humped mass distribution, observed for nuclei around 208Pb, appears with about the same weight as the double-humped mass distribution, observed for heavier actinides. The figure below shows the resulting triple-humped distribution with a fine structure due to pairing correlations. |
