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The renewed interest for the study of nuclear fission is mainly motivated by the development of GEN-IV reactor concepts, mostly foreseen to operate in the fast neutron energy domain. To support this development, new high-quality nuclear data are needed. In this context, a new experimental setup, the FALSTAFF spectrometer, dedicated to the study of nuclear fission is under development. Employing the double-velocity (2V) and energy-velocity (EV) methods, the fission fragment mass before and after neutron evaporation will be deduced and the correlation between prompt neutron multiplicity and fragment mass will be determined. The first arm of the spectrometer is achieved. It is composed of two SED-MWPC detectors (a combination of a foil to produce secondary electrons and a Multi-Wire Proportional Chamber to detect them) and an axial ionization chamber. The SED-MWPC give access to the velocity (V) via time-of-flight and position measurements. The ionization chamber measures the fragment kinetic energy (E) and the energy loss profile. Preliminary results for spontaneous fission of 252Cf and from the thermal-neutron induced fission experiment on 235U, performed at the Orphée reactor (CEA-Saclay, France), are presented.

The study of nuclear fission is encountering renewed interest with the development of GEN-IV reactor concepts, mostly working in the neutron fast energy domain. To support the fast reactor technologies, new high quality nuclear data are needed. New facilities are being constructed to produce high intensity neutron beams from hundreds of keV to few tens of MeV (Licorne, NFS, nELBE, ...). They will open new opportunities to provide nuclear data. In this framework the development of an experimental setup called FALSTAFF for a characterisation of actinide fission fragments has been undertaken. Fission fragment yields and associated neutron multiplicities will be measured as a function of the neutron energy. Based on time-of-flight and residual energy technique, the setup will allow the simultaneous measurement of the complementary fragment velocity and energy. The FALSTAFF setup and the upgrade of the first arm prototype with the new ionisation chamber CALIBER will be presented. The performances of the experimental apparatus is discussed.

237Np absolute delayed neutron yields have been measured at different incident neutron energies from 1.5 to 16 MeV. The experiment was performed at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) facility where the Van de Graaff accelerator and the cyclotron CV28 delivered 9 different neutron energy beams using p+T, d+D and d+T reactions. The detection system is made up of twelve 3He tubes inserted into a polyethylene cylinder. In this paper, the experimental setup and the data analysis method are described. The evolution of the absolute DN yields as a function of the neutron incident beam energies are presented and compared to experimental data found in the literature and data from the libraries.

In the past years, the fission studies have been mainly focused on thermal fission because most of the current nuclear reactors work in this energy domain. With the development of GEN-IV reactor concepts, mainly working in the fast energy domain, new nuclear data are needed. The FALSTAFF spectrometer under development at CEA-Saclay, France, is a two-arm spectrometer which will provide mass yields before (2V method) and after (EV method) neutron evaporation and consequently will have access to the neutron multiplicity as a function of mass. The axial ionization chamber, in addition to the kinetic energy value, will measure the energy loss profile of the fragment along its track. This energy loss profile will give information about the fragment nuclear charge. This paper will focus on recent developments on the FALSTAFF design. A special attention will be paid to the impact of the detector material thickness on the uncertainty of different observables.

Transfer- and fusion-induced fission in inverse kinematics was proven to be a powerful tool to investigate nuclear fission, widening the information of the fission fragments and the access to unstable fissioning systems with respect to other experimental approaches. An experimental campaign for fission investigation has being carried out at GANIL with this technique since 2008. In these experiments, a beam of 238U, accelerated to 6.1 MeV/u, impinges on a 12C target. Fissioning systems from U to Cf are populated through transfer and fusion reactions, with excitation energies that range from few MeV up to 46 MeV. The use of inverse kinematics, the SPIDER telescope, and the VAMOS spectrometer permitted the characterization of the fissioning system in terms of mass, nuclear charge, and excitation energy, and the isotopic identification of the full fragment distribution. The neutron excess, the total neutron multiplicity, and the even-odd staggering in the nuclear charge of fission fragments are presented as a function of the excitation energy of the fissioning system. Structure effects are observed at Z∼50 and Z∼55, where their impact evolves with the excitation energy.

Numerous domains, in fundamental research as well as in applications, require the study of reactions induced by neutrons with energies from few MeV up to few tens of MeV. Reliable measurements also are necessary to improve the evaluated databases used by nuclear transport codes. This energy range covers a large number of topics like transmutation of nuclear waste, design of future fission and fusion reactors, nuclear medicine or test and development of new detectors. A new facility called Neutrons For Science (NFS) is being built for this purpose on the GANIL site at Caen (France). NFS is composed of a pulsed neutron beam for time-of-flight facility as well as irradiation stations for cross-section measurements. Neutrons will be produced by the interaction of deuteron and proton beams, delivered by the SPIRAL-2 linear accelerator, with thick or thin converters made of beryllium or lithium. Continuous and quasi-mono-energetic spectra will be available at NFS up to 40 MeV. In this fast energy region, the neutron flux is expected to be up to 2 orders of magnitude higher than at other existing time-of-flight facilities. In addition, irradiation stations for neutron-, proton- and deuteron-induced reactions will allow performing cross-section measurements by the activation technique. After a description of the facility and its characteristics, the experiments to be performed in the short and medium term will be presented.

Experimental access to full isotopic fragment distributions is very important to determine the features of the fission process. However, the isotopic identification of fission fragments has been, in the past, partial and scarce. A solution based on the use of inverse kinematics to study transfer-induced fission of exotic actinides was carried out at GANIL, resulting in the first experiment accessing the full identification of a collection of fissioning systems and their corresponding fission fragment distribution. In these experiments, a 238U beam at 6.14 AMeV impinged on a carbon target to produce fissioning systems from U to Am by transfer reactions, and Cf by fusion reactions. Isotopic fission yields of 250Cf, 244Cm, 240Pu, 239Np and 238U are presented in this work. With this information, the average number of neutrons as a function of the atomic number of the fragments is calculated, which reflects the impact of nuclear structure around Z=50, N=80 on the production of fission fragments. The characteristics of the Super Long, Standard I, Standard II, and Standard III fission channels were extracted from fits of the fragment yields for different ranges of excitation energy. The position and contribution of the fission channels as function of excitation energy are presented.

The Neutrons for Science (NFS) facility will be one of the first installations of the SPIRAL2 facility. NFS will be composed of a time-of-flight baseline and irradiation stations and will allow studying neutron-induced reactions for energies going from some hundreds of keV up to 40 MeV. Continuous and quasi-monoenergetic energy neutron beams will be available. Taking advantage of this new installation, the development of an experimental setup for a full characterization of actinide fission fragments in this energy domain has been undertaken. To achieve this goal a new detection system called FALSTAFF (Four Arm cLover for the STudy of Actinide Fission Fragments) in under development. In this paper, the characteristics of the NFS facility will be exposed and the motivations for the FALSTAFF experiment will be presented. The experimental setup will be described and the expected resolutions based on realistic GEANT4 simulations will be discussed.

Delayed neutrons (DN) play an important role in nuclear reactor physics. Innovative critical reactor studies bring to light the need of new DN yields data. For the Th fuel cycle, according to the OECD recommendation, DN of the 232Th is needed with an accuracy of 5%. In the literature, significant discrepancies were observed for energies below 4 MeV and data are dispersed around 14 MeV. Therefore, a programme has been undertaken by CEA in order to measure DN yields from 232Th with incident neutron energies from 2 to 16 MeV. In this paper, the experimental setup will be described and preliminary results obtained at the PTB Ion Accelerator Facility of Braunschweig for incident neutron beam energies of 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10 and 16 MeV will be presented.

The inelastic neutron acceleration (INNA) cross section on the long-lived isomer state of 177mLu has been measured from a new isomeric target using a direct method. The detection of high energy neutrons has been performed using a specially designed setup and a cold neutron beam at the ORPHEE reactor facility in Saclay.

The future NFS installation will produce high intensity neutron beams from hundreds of keV up to 40 MeV. Taking advantage of this facility, data of particular interest for the nuclear community in view of the development of the fast reactor technology will be measured. The development of an experimental setup called FALSTAFF for a full characterization of actinide fission fragments has been undertaken. Fission fragment isotopic yields and associated neutron multiplicities will be measured as a function of the neutron energy. Based on time-of-flight and residual energy technique, the setup will allow the simultaneous measurement of the complementary fragments velocity and energy. The performances of TOF detectors of FALSTAFF will be presented and expected resolutions for fragment masses and neutron multiplicities, based on realistic simulations, will be shown.