Non-equilibrium Green's function approach to low-energy fission dynamics: fluctuations in fission reactions

Abstract

We present a microscopic modeling for a decay of a heavy compound nucleus, starting from a nucleonic degree of freedom. To this end, we develop an approach based on a non-equilibrium Green's function, which is combined with a configuration interaction (CI) approach based on a constrained density-functional theory (DFT). We apply this approach to a barrier-top fission of $^{236}$U, restricting the model space to seniority zero configurations of neutrons and protons. We particularly focus on the distribution of the fission probability. We find that it approximately follows the chi-squared distribution with the number of degrees of freedom $\nu$ of the order of 1, which is consistent with the experimental finding. We also show that $\nu$ corresponds to the number of eigenstates of the many-body Hamiltonian whose energy is close to the excitation energy of the system and at the same time which have significant components on both sides of a fission barrier.