Microscopic description of the fission process including intrinsic excitations. Part II: 240Pu excited and asymmetric fission paths within the Schrodinger Collective

Abstract

This second article of the trilogy presents the implementation of a third protocol, referred to as Continuous Deflation, designed to construct continuous and regular excited paths within the Schrodinger Collective-Intrinsic Model (SCIM), with applications to nuclear fission. We show that the use of standard 2QP excitations, even when combined with particle-number projection, prevents a consistent application of the SCIM framework. Motivated by the central role of pair breaking in low-energy fission, we explore how to construct intrinsic excited states that incorporate this mechanism while satisfying the continuity and regularity state requirements of the SCIM. To this end, we first analyze the Deflation procedure alone, which constructs excited states through orthogonality constraints. We then extend this construction along a deformation path by introducing an additional continuity constraint, thereby defining the Continuous Deflation method, which generates continuous paths based on excited states. In particular, we construct ten such continuous paths built on top of the adiabatic and asymmetric fission path of 240Pu. The resulting excited states are systematically analyzed in terms of their microscopic structure. We then investigate several fragment properties near scission, including neutron and proton chemical potentials, neutron necking as well as fragment particle-number distributions, and compare them with their adiabatic counterparts.