Microscopic study of neutron-induced fission process of 239Pu via zero- and finite-temperature density functional theory*

Abstract

Abstract To study the neutron-induced fission of Pu, potential energy surface (PES) calculations were performed using zero and finite-temperature density functional theory (FT-DFT) with the Skyrme force. The energy of the incident neutron was simulated by the temperature of the FT-DFT. The variations of the least-energy fission path, fission barrier, total kinetic energy, scission line, and mass distribution of fission fragments with the incident neutron energy were analyzed. It was learned that an increase in the temperature lowers the barrier height, the isomeric-state energy, and the ridge between symmetric and asymmetric fission valleys. Additionally, the gaps of the single particle levels become smaller with an increase in the temperature. As the temperature increases, the pre-fission region shrinks, and the scission occurs at smaller deformation around the symmetric fission channel. At low temperatures, the pairing correlations in the collective space are similar to those in zero-temperature DFT, and when the temperature is 0.3 MeV, the pairing gaps decrease rapidly. Two different methods were used to calculate the fission yields of the neutron-induced fission Pu (n, f) with different incident neutron energies, in the framework of time-dependent generator coordinate method (TDGCM). One way to calculate the fission yield of Pu (n, f) is to solve the collective equation of the TDGCM by using the PES from the FT-DFT with the corresponding temperature. The other involves using the PES from the zero-temperature DFT and adjusting the initial collective energy of the wave packet in the TDGCM according to the incident neutron energy. For the cases of the lower incident neutron energies, these two methods gave similar results and reproduced the experimental peak and width of fission fragment distribution. However, for the highest incident neutron energy considered in this study, the results from the TDGCM using the PES from zero-temperature DFT deviated explicitly from the experimental data, whereas those obtained by using the PES from FT-DFT remained close to the experimental data. This indicated that, with the increase in the incident neutron energy, the shell structure of the compound nuclei changed explicitly; thus, it may not be effective to use the PES from zero-temperature to perform the fission dynamic calculation.