Fission of 180,182,183Hg∗ and 178Pt∗ nuclei at intermediate excitation energies

Abstract

Asymmetric fission of mercury nuclei was initially observed in the low-energy region. In recent years, several experiments have been performed in this direction to investigate the asymmetric behaviour of Hg nuclei which supported the influence of shell effects on the asymmetric fission process. An experiment was performed using the CORSET setup. We investigated mass and energy distributions of fragments and fission characteristics of prolately-deformed 182Hg and oblately-deformed 183Hg nuclei formed in the 40Ca+142,143Nd reactions at three different beam energies - Elab = 172, 192, and 212 MeV. We found no huge variation in mass-energy distributions of 182Hg and 183Hg at any of the measured energies. This gives us an outlook regarding the influence of shell structure, charge radii deformation, and factors associated with the potential energy surface that is responsible for fission in the Hg region.