Towards a Langevin Model for the Stochastic Dynamics of Nuclear Fission

A robust description of the process of nuclear fission is essential to many research domains ranging from nuclear energy, national security, and nuclear data. However, owing to the nuclear many-body problem, a description of fission based on nucleon-nucleon interactions is unfeasible given current computational limitations, which has led to a number of alternative methods that greatly reduce the overall complexity of this difficult problem. In this work, we present results of recent efforts to model the process of nuclear fission from the perspective of a microscopic-macroscopic model of the atomic nucleus, where fission proceeds from an initially excited state to scission as a stochastic process according to a progression of increasingly sophisticated treatments of the stochastic dynamics. In contrast with our past work, which has treated fission in the strongly-damped limit described by a random-walk process, this approach furnishes the kinetic energies associated with the nascent fragments, which is subsequently used to model the de-excitation properties of fission fragments. LA-UR-21-29350