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Shapes and Fission in Heavy Nuclei

Laser-spectroscopy, shell evolution and the fission process in exotic heavy nuclei

This theme aims to address the questions: "What are the limits of nuclear existence", “How does the fission process change in nuclei far from the classical uranium region?” and “How do the spherical and deformed shell structures evolve in hard-to-access, neutron-rich, heavy nuclides?”.

Several research strands will be addressed by the theme (main regions of our interest are shown in Fig.1)

  • The cause of the new island of asymmetric fission in the neutron-deficient lead region discovered at ISOLDE in the experiments led by Andreyev. Experiments at ISOLDE, VAMOS and in Japan Atomic energy agency (JAEA, Tokai, Japan)
  • The existence and strength of the N=152 deformed shell closure probed by multi-modal fission and decay properties of the neutron-rich Pa-No nuclei south and east of 238U, at the KISS facility in RIKEN.
  • The origin of the A~195 mass abundance peak via studies of the neutron-rich refractory W-Pt elements south of 208Pb in the vicinity of spherical N=126 shell closure at KISS@RIKEN. Laser spectroscopy of the neutron-deficient refractory elements.
  • Search for new isotopes in the neutron-deficient At-Fr isotopes (ANL, RIKEN)

We perform our experiments at the number of large-scale international facilities, like ISOLDE-CERN(Switzeland), Argonne National Lab (ANL, US), GANIL (France), RIKEN(Japan). A strong collaboration has been recently establlished with several experimental and theory research groups in China, e.g. at the Institute for Modern Research (IMP, Lanzhou), PKU (Beijing), Zhuhai, and others.

Figure 1: Chart of the nuclides, with the three regions of interest marked by ovals, and highlights of the main research topics provided (see main text for further details).

Figure 1: Chart of the nuclides, with the three regions of interest marked by ovals, and highlights of the main research topics provided (see main text for further details).