Recent studies in heavy ion induced fission reactions

Nuclear fission process involves large scale shape changes of the nucleus, while it evolves from a nearly spherical configuration to two separated fission fragments. The dynamics of these shape changes in the nuclear many body system is governed by a strong interplay of the collective and single particle degrees of freedom. With the availability of heavy ion accelerators, there has been an impetus to study the nuclear dynamics through the investigations of nucleus-nucleus collisions involving fusion and fission process. From the various investigations carried out in the past years, it is now well recognized that there is large scale damping of collective modes in heavy ion induced fission reactions, which in other words implies that nuclear motion is highly viscous. In recent years, there have been many experimental observations in heavy ion induced fission reactions at medium bombarding energies, which suggest possible occurrence of various non-equilibrium modes of fission such as quasi-fission, fast fission and pre-equilibrium fission, where some of the internal degrees of freedom of the nucleus is not fully equilibrated. We have carried out extensive investigations on the fission fragment angular distributions at near barrier bombarding energies using heavy fissile targets. The measured fragment anisotropies when compared with the standard saddle point model (SSPM) calculations show that for projectile-target systems having zero or low ground state spins, the angular anisotropy exhibits a peak-like behaviour at the sub barrier energies, which cannot be explained by the SSPM calculations. For projectiles or targets with large ground state spins, the anomalous peaking gets washed out due to smearing of the K-distribution by the intrinsic entrance channel spins. Recently studies have been carried out on the spin distributions of fission fragments through the gamma ray multiplicity measurements. The fission fragments acquire spin mainly from two sources: (i) due to rigid rotation of the nascent fragments at scission and (ii) due to statistical excitation of the spin bearing collective modes in the fissioning nucleus. One of the collective modes — the tilting mode depends on the K quantum number and is responsible for the emission angle dependence of fragment spin. In our studies, we have shown conclusively that the collective statistical spin modes get strongly suppressed for high K values corresponding to large rotational frequencies along the fission axis. These results bring out the importance of the dynamical effects in the heavy ion induced fusion-fission reactions. The present article will review the work carried out on the above aspects in heavy ion fission reactions as well as on the fission time scales, and some of the recent studies on the mass-energy correlations of fission fragments at near-barrier bombarding energies.