The Peculiarities of the Production and Decay of Superheavy Nuclei.

The interest in the study of the fission process of superheavy nuclei mainly deals with the opportunity to obtain information about the cross-section of the compound nucleus (CN) formation at excitation energies E*≈15–30 MeV. It allows one to estimate the survival probability of the superheavy composite system after evaporation of 1–3 neutrons, i.e. in “cold” or “warm” fusion reactions. However, in order to solve this problem deeper understanding of the coalescence processes between colliding nuclei, the competition between fusion-fission and quasi-fission processes is needed. The characteristics of both processes, their manifestation in the experimental observables and the relative contribution to the capture cross-section in dependence on the excitation energies, reaction entrance channel etc were investigated for a wide range of target-projectile combinations. Results of the experiments devoted to the study of the fusion-fission and quasi-fission processes in the reactions of the formation of the superheavy nuclei with Z = 102–122 are presented. The heavy ions 26Mg, 48Ca, 50Ti, 58Fe and 64Ni were used as projectiles. The choice of the reactions with 48Ca and actinide-targets was inspired by the experiments on the production of the isotopes 283112, 289114 and 283116 in Dubna using the same reactions. The 50Ti, 58Fe and 64Ni projectiles were chosen since the corresponding projectile-target combinations lead to the synthesis of even heavier elements. The experiments were carried out at the U-400 accelerator of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (JINR, Russia) and the XTU Tandem accelerator of the National Laboratory of Legnaro (LNL, Italy) using the time-of-flight spectrometer of fission fragments CORSET. The role of the shell effects, the influence of the entrance channel asymmetry and the deformations of colliding nuclei on the mechanism of the fusion-fission and the competitive process of quasi-fission are discussed. The recent results on synthesis of superheavy nuclei and the perspectives of the “hot” fusion reaction for the production of superheavy nuclei are considered. © 2006 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]