Giant nuclear systems of molecular type

Abstract

Low-energy dynamics of heavy nuclear systems is studied within the extended version of the two-center shell model and Langevin type equations of motion. The shell effects lead to the appearance of local minima and deep valleys on the multi-dimensional potential energy surface. It is shown that the local minima on the fission path of a heavy nucleus-so called isomeric states-are nothing else but the two-cluster configurations with magic or semi-magic cores surrounded with a certain number of shared nucleons. Clustering phenomena caused by the shell effects play an important role also in low-energy dynamics of heavy nuclear systems. Fission and quasi-fission are the well-known processes of such kind discussed in the paper. We found that in low-energy damped multi-nucleon transfer reactions the shell effects may significantly enhance the yield of new heavy neutron-rich nuclei located in the unexplored "north-east" area of the nuclear map which is important for astrophysical nucleosynthesis. A possibility for the production of long-living neutron-rich superheavy nuclei in collisions of actinide ions (such as 238U + 248Cm) is another important finding. In these reactions a large mass and charge transfer due to the inverse (anti-symmetrized) quasi-fission process is significantly enhanced by the clustering process with formation of closed shell nuclei around Z = 82 and N = 126. In many such collisions the lifetime of a composite system consisting of two touching actinide nuclei turns out to be rather long (> 10-20S). This time delay is sufficient for the observation of the line structure in spontaneous e + e - production from the supercritical electric field of a giant quasi-atom-a fundamental QED process not observed yet experimentally. In addition, this giant nuclear molecule might undergo to a three-body clusterization (ternary quasi-fission) with formation of two heavy lead-like fragments in the exit channel. The "true ternary fission" is also possible for superheavy nuclei' © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.