Isospin Conservation in Neutron Rich Systems of Heavy Nuclei

Abstract

It is generally believed that isospin would diminish in its importance as we go towards heavy mass region due to isospin mixing caused by the growing Coulomb forces. However, it was realized quite early that isospin could become an important and useful quantum number for all nuclei including heavy nuclei due to neutron richness of the systems [1]. Lane and Soper [2] also showed in a theoretical calculation that isospin indeed remains quite good in heavy mass neutron rich systems. In this paper, we present isospin based calculations [3,4] for the fission fragment distributions obtained from heavy-ion fusion fission reactions. We discuss in detail the procedure adopted to assign the isospin values and the role of neutron multiplicity data in obtaining the total fission fragment distributions. We show that the observed fragment distributions can be reproduced rather reasonably well by the calculations based on the idea of conservation of isospin. This is a direct experimental evidence of the validity of isospin in heavy nuclei, which arises largely due to the neutron-rich nature of heavy nuclei and their fragments. This result may eventually become useful for the theories of nuclear fission and also in other practical applications.

Role of isospin and its conservation in neutron-rich fission fragments

“…A very brief account of our calculations and initial results for 208 Pb( 18 O, f) have recently been presented in the references [13,14]. We have also successfully carried out these calculations for the 245 Cm(n th , f) data, presented in the reference [15].…”

“…In this paper, we present detailed calculations and results, which show that isospin is able to reproduce the main features of fission fragment mass distribution providing the first direct evidence of near goodness of isospin in neutron-rich systems [13,14,21]. However, no shell effects and corrections for isomeric transitions have been taken into account.…”