Microscopic description of induced fission in a configuration interaction approach.

Even though more than 80 years have passed since the discovery of fission, its microscopic understanding has still been unclear. To clarify the underlying mechanics of induced fission, we analyze the distribution of a fission width using a miscropic framework based on a configuration-interaction approach. The distribution is known to follow a chi-squared distribution, which is characterized by the effective number of decay channels, ν. We introduce an effective Hamitonian for the space of compound nucleus states and estimate ν from the rank of the imaginary part of the effective Hamiltonian. Applying the model to 235U(n,f), we succesfully reproduce the empirical value of ν = 2.3 ± 1.1. We also find that ν is insensitve to the number of fission channels, which is consistent with an experimental finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]