Probing the Pathway to Superheavy Nuclei: TDHF Studies of Quasi-Fission

par Richard Gumbel (FRIB, MSU)

jeudi 7 mai 2026, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Paris

100/2-A201 - Salle A201 (IJCLab)

Efforts to extend the periodic table past its current atomic limit of oganesson ($Z$ = 118) are underway in research facilities around the world. This research is complemented by work to further populate the superheavy region of the nuclear mass chart, through the creation of new, neutron-rich isotopes of known transactinides ($Z$ > 103). Both aims have been motivated by the search for superheavy nuclei that, due to predicted shell closures, will exhibit enhanced lifetimes relative to their short-lived neighbors. This mass region is historically called the Island of Stability, and its exact location and extent remains an open question in low-energy nuclear physics.

This theory seminar will discuss the use of time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) methods to study the heavy-ion reactions used to create superheavy nuclei (SHN), focusing particularly on a decay channel  which suppresses their formation: the out-of-equilibrium process of quasi-fission. Quasi-fission is the dominant reaction outcome for these  heavy-ion collisions, where a nascent di-nuclear compound forms but scissions before the process of fusion is complete. Experimentally, it can be difficult to disentangle from the competing process of fusion-fission. Unlike fusion-fission, however, quasi-fission outcomes are highly sensitive to choices made for the entrance channel. The TDHF framework offers a means to study quasi-fission in a manner that is both computationally tractable and systematically applied across different collision partners, beam energies, orientations, and angular momenta, while identifying underlying trends in the reaction mechanism.