Fission of medium mass elements induced by 126 MeV 14N ions

Ni, Se, Mo, Ag, Ho and Au targets were bombarded by 126 MeV ¹⁴N ions in order to study compound nucleus fission. The large angular momentum brought in by the projectile implies much greater fission probabilities than those obtained when the same compound nuclei are created with light projectiles. We employed two surface-barrier detectors. The results obtained are fission cross sections, angular correlations and kinetic energy and mass distributions. Fissilities are found to decrease exponentially with the ratio Z²/A of the fissioning nucleus until Z²/A = 19 (molybdenum) and then to increase again for lower Z²/A. The calculations of fissilities performed with the fission barrier of Myers and Swiatecki, and including angular momentum effects in evaporation-fission competition, gives the same variation of fissilities as the experimental one, but the results obtained are lower than the experimental values. The total kinetic energies measured are higher than the predictions of the liquid drop model by around 10 MeV (Nix). The shapes of the mass distributions indicate that the value of x_BG (Businaro-Gallone point) is lower than 0.4 (silver).