Nuclear Fission: from more phenomenology and adjusted parameters to more fundamental theory and increased predictive power

Abstract

Two major recent developments in theory and computational resources created the favorable conditions for achieving a microscopic description of nuclear fission almost eighty years after its discovery in 1939 by Hahn and Strassmann (1930). The first major development was in theory, the extension of the Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory (TDDFT) to superfluid fermion systems. The second development was in computing, the emergence of powerful enough supercomputers capable of solving the complex systems of equations describing the time evolution in three dimensions without any restrictions of hundreds of strongly interacting nucleons. Even though the available nuclear energy density functionals (NEDFs) are phenomenological still, their accuracy is improving steadily and the prospects of being able to perform calculations of the nuclear fission dynamics and to predict many properties of the fission fragments, otherwise not possible to extract from experiments, are within reach, all without making recourse anymore to uncontrollable assumptions and simplified phenomenological models.