Fission description: First steps towards a full resolution of the time-dependent Hill-Wheeler equation

¹ CEA, DAM, DIF, 91297 Arpajon, France
² Nuclear and Chemical Science Division, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94551, USA

^a e-mail: marc.verriere@cea.fr
^b e-mail: noel.dubray@cea.fr

Published online: 13 September 2017

Abstract

Dynamical description of low energy fission is, in our full microscopic approach, decomposed in two steps. In the first step we generate the Potential Energy Surface (PES) of the compound system we want to describe with the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) method with a Gogny interaction. The second step uses the Time Dependent Generator Coordinate Method (TDGCM) with the Gaussian Overlap Approximation (GOA). The GOA holds in two assumptions: the overlap matrix between HFB states has a gaussian shape (with respect to the difference between coordinates of states in deformation space); and the expectation value of the collective hamiltonian between these states can be expanded up to order two, leading in this case to a Schrödinger-like equation. In this work we replace TDGCM+GOA in the second step of our approach by an exact treatment of the TDGCM. The main equation of this method is the time-dependent Hill-Wheeler equation and involves two objects: the overlap matrix and the collective hamiltonian. We first calculate these matrices on a PES. Then, we build an “exact TDGCM” solver using a finite element method and a Crank-Nicolson scheme. In this talk, we will present the time-dependent Hill-Wheeler equation and discretization schemes (in time and deformation space). The analytic calculation of overlap matrix and collective hamiltonian will be detailed. Finally, first results with an exact treatment of the TDGCM will be discussed.