Impact of Collective Correlations on Fission Fragment Properties

Accurate knowledge of fission fragment properties is crucial for applications ranging from energy production to nucleosynthesis simulations. State-of-the-art nuclear theory can reproduce fission fragments' charge and mass distribution at best to within 10-20% accuracy. While microscopic models of collective dynamics take into account quantum configuration mixing to predict the probability of populating specific nuclear shapes in the fissioning nucleus - hence specific fragments, the calculation of the most basic properties of these fission fragments such as their number of protons, neutrons or total angular momentum neglects these correlations. This results in non-physical effects such as artificially low yields of fragments with odd numbers of particles. In this talk, we explore how to extend the generator coordinate method with the Gaussian overlap approximation to calculating the number of particles in fission fragments and how such collective correlations impact fission fragment distributions.