Detailed modeling of odd–even staggering in fission-fragment charge distributions: Damping of staggering effects with excitation energy and compound-nucleus charge

During the last 10 years or so the Brownian shape-motion (BSM) model has been used in numerous calculations of fission-fragment mass and charge distributions with encouraging agreement with experimental measurements. In this model the structure obtained in the fission-fragment distributions is entirely a consequence of the structures in the calculated five-dimensional (5D) potential-energy surfaces. The potential-energy model until recently did not accommodate the influence of the emerging fragment properties on the calculated potential energy. Therefore there were no odd-even effects in the calculated fission-fragment distributions. Recent extensions of the potential-energy model allow properties of the nascent fragments to be included in the potential-energy model. Application of the BSM model to execute random walks on these more detailed potential-energy surfaces led to calculated fission-fragment yields that exhibited odd-even effects, which “by eye” indicated reasonable agreement with experimental data. The present work goes a step further with a quantitative comparison between experimental and theoretical results based on the global and local odd-even staggering observables. Theoretical calculations and experimental observations both show that pairing effects and enhancement of two-nucleon relative to one-nucleon transfer in heavy-ion collisions decrease with excitation energy and implementing a damping of these quantities with excitation energy leads to improved agreement with experiment. Characteristic variations of the local staggering with charge split seen in the experimental data are also present in the calculated results. © The Author(s) 2024.