W&M Featured Events
This calendar presented by
William & Mary
[PAST EVENT] Physics Colloquium
April 24, 2015
4pm - 5pm
This will highlight a very exciting new calculation of Fission using a strategy that works on a laptop (as opposed to the supercomputer QuantumMonteCarlo calculations of his competitors that do not do as well comparing with experimental results).
His abstract is:
Ever since its discovery, nuclear fission has posed challenges to our understanding of the dynamical properties of nuclear systems. The process can be regarded as an evolution of the nuclear shape, from the original compound nucleus to the two receding fragments. But even the qualitative character of this macroscopic evolution remains a somewhat contentious issue. But there is growing evidence that the nuclear shape dynamics is strongly dissipative, in which case the evolution resembles Brownian motion. Several simplifying idealizations of the theoretical treatment then suggest themselves and, as a result, nuclear fission can be described as a random walk on the multi-dimensional deformation-energy surface. This conceptually simple picture leads to a remarkably powerful tool for calculating the mass distributions of the resulting fission fragments for practically any fissionable nucleus.
His abstract is:
Ever since its discovery, nuclear fission has posed challenges to our understanding of the dynamical properties of nuclear systems. The process can be regarded as an evolution of the nuclear shape, from the original compound nucleus to the two receding fragments. But even the qualitative character of this macroscopic evolution remains a somewhat contentious issue. But there is growing evidence that the nuclear shape dynamics is strongly dissipative, in which case the evolution resembles Brownian motion. Several simplifying idealizations of the theoretical treatment then suggest themselves and, as a result, nuclear fission can be described as a random walk on the multi-dimensional deformation-energy surface. This conceptually simple picture leads to a remarkably powerful tool for calculating the mass distributions of the resulting fission fragments for practically any fissionable nucleus.