A study of competing decay channels of nuclear systems formed in low energy heavy ion reactions

Abstract

The present study is carried out to understand the theoretical aspects and signatures of various decay processes observed in reactions involving heavy, intermediate and light mass nuclei. The decay of hot (T6=0) and rotating (`6=0) nuclear systems formed in low energy heavy ion reactions is studied in form of evaporation residues (ERs; also called light particles LPs), intermediate mass fragments (IMFs) and symmetric, asymmetric fission fragments, by applying the dynamical cluster-decay model (DCM), which treats all these decay processes on equal footing. The DCM, applied to study the aforementioned decay processes for various nuclei formed via complete fusion (CF) and incomplete fusion (ICF) processes focusses primarily on the role of deformations, related optimum orientations, temperature and angular momentum effects. Besides this an attempt is also made to address the non-compound nucleus (nCN) mechanisms such as quasi-fission (QF) and deep inelastic collision (DIC) in framework of DCM. The thesis is organized into seven chapters and the outline of wok carried is given below. Chapter 1 starts with general introduction of nuclear physics, its applications, importance, relevance to mankind and converges to the understanding of nuclear reaction dynamics and related nuclear structure effects involved in low energy heavy ion collisions. Further, an extensive study of compound nucleus (CN) formed through CF, the ICF process and the nCN mechanism is carried out explaining the factors influencing the Chapter 2 gives the detail of methodology used, the DCM for the decay of hot and rotating nuclei. It is based on quantum mechanical fragmentation theory (QMFT) and the temperature, angular momentum, deformations and orientations effects are incorporated within DCM description.