Correlation studies of fission-fragment neutron multiplicities

Describing fission as a diffusion process guided by shape-dependent microscopic level densities, the authors address how the available energy at scission is divided into shape distortion and statistical excitation. For the first time, they extract the resulting total fragment kinetic energy for various mass partitions, and study how this observable correlates with the neutron multiplicity. With increasing neutron energy a superlong fission mode appears which drastically changes the observables.