Physics Letters B 760 (2016) 236–241
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
New neutron-rich isotope production in
154
Sm+
160
Gd
Ning Wang
a,∗
, Lu Guo
b,c
a
Department of Physics, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin 541004, People’s Republic of China
b
School of Physics, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, People’s Republic of China
c
State Key Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, People’s Republic of China
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
12 May 2016
Received
in revised form 28 June 2016
Accepted
28 June 2016
Available
online 1 July 2016
Editor:
W. Haxton
Deep inelastic scattering in
154
Sm+
160
Gd at energies above the Bass barrier is for the first time
investigated with two different microscopic dynamics approaches: improved quantum molecular
dynamics (ImQMD) model and time dependent Hartree–Fock (TDHF) theory. No fusion is observed from
both models. The capture pocket disappears for this reaction due to strong Coulomb repulsion and the
contact time of the di-nuclear system formed in head-on collisions is about 700 fm/c at an incident
energy of 440 MeV. The isotope distribution of fragments in the deep inelastic scattering process is
predicted with the simulations of the latest ImQMD-v2.2 model together with a statistical code (GEMINI)
for describing the secondary decay of fragments. More than 40 extremely neutron-rich unmeasured
nuclei with 58 ≤ Z ≤ 76 are observed and the production cross sections are at the order of μbto mb. The
multi-nucleon transfer reaction of Sm+Gd could be an alternative way to synthesize new neutron-rich
lanthanides which are difficult to be produced with traditional fusion reactions or fission of actinides.
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
The heavy-ion reaction at energies around the Coulomb bar-
rier
is an important way not only for the study of the nuclear
structures, but also for the synthesis of unstable or even exotic
(neutron-rich, neutron-deficient, superheavy) nuclei for which no
experimental data exist [1–8]. For light and intermediate fusion
systems, the fusion process is usually described by the penetra-
tion
of the fusion barriers. The fusion (capture) cross sections can
be accurately predicted by using the fusion coupled channel cal-
culations
or empirical barrier distribution approaches [9–14]. For
fusion systems leading to the synthesis of super-heavy elements,
the quasi-fission and fusion–fission process significantly compli-
cates
the description of fusion process. The very shallow capture
pockets in such kind of reaction systems may cause some diffi-
culties
in the applications of the barrier-penetration approaches.
Although macroscopic dynamics models [15–19] met with some
success for describing the residual evaporation cross sections of
measured super-heavy systems, the uncertainty of the predicted
fusion probability from these different models for unmeasured sys-
tems
is still large due to the uncertainty of model parameters
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: wangning@gxnu.edu.cn (N. Wang), luguo@ucas.ac.cn (L. Guo).
[20,21] and ambiguity of reaction mechanism. For example, with
the fusion-by-diffusion model, Choudhury and Gupta [22] investi-
gated
symmetric heavy-ion reaction of
154
Sm+
154
Sm and obtained
measurable evaporation residue cross sections (∼ 0.6pb). How-
ever,
Cap et al. [23] investigated the same reaction and found the
cross sections are extremely small (about 10
−13
pb) and proba-
bly
never reachable. The contradictory predictions imply some key
model parameters such as the injection point distance and the
dynamical nucleus–nucleus potential are far from clear for this re-
action.
It is therefore necessary to investigate the dynamics process
and fusion probability in this kind of reactions with self-consistent
microscopic dynamics models.
In
addition to the formation of superheavy nuclei, the syn-
thesis
of extremely neutron-rich heavy nuclides through multi-
fragmentation,
deep inelastic scattering and quasi-fission are of
exceptional importance to advance our understanding of nuclear
structure at the extreme isospin limit of the nuclear landscape
[24–28]. Neutron-rich lanthanides, such as
182
70
Yb
112
with “false
magic numbers”, are of importance for understanding the strength
of spin–orbit interaction which influences the positions of the
island of stability for super-heavy nuclei. Unfortunately, if one
glances at the chart of nuclides (see the positions of known nuclei
in AME2012 [29]), one notes that the number of observed neutron-
rich
nuclides is very limited at mass region A > 160, due to that
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2016.06.073
0370-2693/
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.