Though the origin of most of the nuclides lighter than iron is now quite well understood, the synthesis of the heavy elements (i.e. heavier than iron) remains puzzling in many respects. The major mechanisms called for to explain the production of the heavy nuclei are the slow neutron-capture process (or s-process), occurring during the hydrostatic stellar burning phases, the rapid...
The role of angular momentum in fission has been the subject of intense recent attention. Published data showed that, while the fission fragment spins may be generated by highly correlated processes, the final, measured, fragment spins appeared to be largely uncorrelated. This talk will summarize advances made with the fission simulation model FREYA to study the role of angular momentum in...
A simple semi-classical treatment of photon cascades has been developed. The basic assumption is that a nucleus with a classical spin vector J can be represented by the maximally aligned quantum state |J,M = J> with the quantization axis being the spin direction J/J. It is furthermore assumed that a photon emission yields a daughter state of a similar form, |J′,M′ = J′>,...
The mechanism generating fission fragments’ large angular momenta is still a heavily discussed question in nuclear physics. Since they are not directly measurable, experimentally accessible observables are used to derive the angular momenta using nuclear model codes. One of these observables is the ratio between the yields of spin isomers produced in a fission reaction, the so-called isomeric...
