ON THE ROLE OF THE WEAK INTERACTION IN THE PROCESS OF NUCLEAR FISSION

Abstract

We investigate the effect of the parity-violating weak interaction in the process of n-induced low-energy fission within a time-dependent microscopic description. We display two different mechanisms of enhancement: a) the well-known enhancement due to the chaotic complexity of compound nuclear states and the concomitant high density of levels, b) an additional dynamical enhancement which arises whenever the substates of a parity doublet cross as a function of the intrinsic octupole moment Q30 on the way to fission. In the last section we discuss other examples of this additional enhancement mechanism which is due to a spontaneous symmetry breaking.