New insights into the mechanism of nuclear fission
E-Mail A series of experiments at the ALTO particle accelerator facility in Orsay, France, has revealed that the fragments resulting from nuclear fission obtain their intrinsic angular momentum (or spin) after fission, not before, as is widely assumed. This result was made possible by the 'nu-ball' collaboration, an international group of nuclear physicists from 37 institutes and 16 countries - among them scientists from TU Darmstadt's Institute of Nuclear Physics - which studied a wide range of nuclei and their structure. The collaboration is led by the Irène-Joliot-Curie Laboratory in Or...