Fission-fragment properties in a microscopic approach

The microscopic description of fission remains one the greatest challenges in nuclear physics. In particular, observed properties of the fission fragments (e.g., kinetic energies, emitted neutron multiplicities, etc.) are notoriously difficult to reproduce and provide a stringent test of the microscopic approach. In this talk, I will present fission-fragment properties extracted from Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov calculations using the Gogny effective interaction for low-energy induced fission of $^{240}$Pu. This approach to fission provides a fully microscopic, self-consistent, quantum-mechanical framework where the only phenomenological input is the effective interaction between nucleons. I will discuss the formal identification of scission configurations and compare deduced fragment properties, such as excitation and kinetic energies, to experimental data.