Does Compound Nucleus remember its Isospin- An Evidence from the Fission Widths

Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee - 247667, India

^* e-mail: swat90.garg@gmail.com

Published online: 16 May 2018

Abstract

We present an evidence of isospin effects in nuclear fission by comparing the fission widths for reactions involving different isospin states of the same compound nucleus (CN). Yadrovsky [1] suggested this possibility in 1975. Yadrovsky obtained the fission widths for two reaction data sets, namely ²⁰⁶Pb(α,f) and ²⁰⁹Bi(p,f), both leading to same CN, and concluded that “a nucleus remembers the isospin value of the nuclear states leading to fission”. We obtain the fission decay widths for both the T₀ + ½ and T₀ − ½ states of CN by using two appropriate reaction data sets. We then compare the fission widths for the two isospin states of CN. More specifically, we have chosen the combination of ²⁰⁶Pb(α,f) and ²⁰⁹Bi(p,f) same as presented in Yadrovsky’s paper [1] in this study. A significant difference between the ratios of fission decay widths to total decay widths for different isospin values suggests that isospin plays an important role in fission.