Effects of nuclear deformation in dinuclear systems : Application to the fission process

The relative yields of fission fragments, the mean values of their total kinetic energy, and the variances of their distributions with respect to the total kinetic energy are described within the improved scission-point model. It is shown that, for fixed charge and mass numbers of fragments, the potential energy of the prescission configuration as a function of the deformation parameters of the fragments has several minima. The scission at these minima leads to a relative enhancement of the yields of the fragments that have the corresponding values of the total kinetic energy and to the appearance of a fine structure in the mass-energy distribution, this structure being different from that induced by the even-odd effect.