Abstract
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the discovery of nuclear fission. While there is little question of the societal importance of fission (e.g., to current and future energy needs), our understanding of this process is still fairly rudimentary due to the intricacy of the problem. Theoretically, fission represents an extreme example of the large-amplitude collective motion: the tunneling of a large, self-bound, superfluid system of mutually interacting particles. In this work, we describe a study of spontaneous fission using the self-consistent nuclear density functional theory and state-of-the-art computational tools. We did not impose any symmetry on the mean field so that the nuclear densities were allowed to acquire arbitrary shapes characterized by elongation, reflection-asymmetry, triaxiality, necking, etc. Here we show that the observed half-lives of nuclei undergoing bimodal fission can be explained in terms of competing pathways corresponding to different geometries of fission products. This is an important step in providing a many-body description of fundamental nuclear decay.