Comparison of fission modes in [sup 252]Cf, [sup 257]Fm, and [sup 260]Md

Although the spontaneous-fission properties of heavy actinides have been studied for well over 35 years, many interesting and informative details continue to come into light. During the last decade, the spontaneous fission of 252Cf, 257Fm and 260Md has been extensively investigated at the Philipps University of Marburg (1–4), by means of a gadolinium-doped liquid scintillation tank for neutron counting and surface barrier detectors for fission fragment detection. The three nuclides represent the transition from the well-known asymmetric fission yield distribution, as it is characteristic for 252Cf, to a much more symmetrical one, found in the fission of 260Md. Therefore, trends in the dynamical changes of fission properties have been derived from these studies. For the spontaneous fission of 252Cf and 260Md, it was already shown that different fission modes, as proposed by theoretical calculations of Brosa et al. (5), could be separated, using the correlation between the neutrons emitted in a fission event and both the observed fission-fragment mass and the total kinetic energy (1, 2). In the case of 257Fm, no theoretical calculations for fission modes exist. However, from the fission properties of the two surrounding actinides, one can expect at least three different fission modes, namely two “standard” and the “supershort” mode. In this paper, results from the recent 257Fm experiment will be presented and compared to systematics extracted from the fission properties of other heavy actinides.