Microscopic description of the fission process including intrinsic excitations. Part I: 240Pu adiabatic and asymmetric fission path within the Schrodinger Collective Intrinsic Model
This article is the first in a trilogy aimed at presenting the first practical implementation of the Schrodinger Collective-Intrinsic Model (SCIM) applied to nuclear fission. Within the SCIM framework, the many-body wave function explicitly couples collective motion to intrinsic excitations, necessitating sets of Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) configurations that remain continuous and regular across a broad deformation range, from the ground state to scission and beyond. This paper focuses on constructing adiabatic HFB paths suitable for subsequent SCIM dynamical calculations. Standard constrained adiabatic paths often suffer from discontinuities and irregularities, which prevent the direct application of the formalism. To address these challenges, we implement two recently proposed overlap-based protocols, the Link and Drop methods, and combine them into a new numerical procedure.A comparison with the exact Gaussian Overlap Approximation confirms that the resulting adiabatic kernels exhibit properties consistent with the assumptions of the SCIM formalism. The regularized path is then analyzed in the scission region. We identify characteristic structures in the proton and neutron chemical potentials, a pronounced neutron enrichment of the neck at scission, and fragment particle-number distributions displaying a strong odd-even staggering in the proton sector. Finally, using a microscopic fragment-separation procedure formulated in the canonical basis, we extract static scission properties including fragment deformation energies and both Coulomb and nuclear contributions to the fragment interaction energy. These results establish the adiabatic foundations required for future SCIM calculations with intrinsic excitations and provide a microscopic characterization of the scission region in 240Pu.