Long Fission Times of Super‐Heavy Compound Nuclei

The blocking technique in single crystals is a direct method to investigate the presence of long fission time components. With a lead beam impinging on a germanium single crystal, we tried to produce compound nuclei (CN) with atomic number Z = 114 at high excitation energy. Blocking patterns for reaction products are reconstructed with position sensitive detectors at 20 ° relative to the beam direction. The Z and the energies of all products are measured with ΔE‐E telescopes of the 4π INDRA array, so that all reaction channels are unambiguously identified. With this setup, we can reach long fission times (>10−18 s) that can be associated with CN fissions. However, in contrast to previous experiments in which such long fission times could be measured for Z = 120 and 124, no hint of long lifetimes within our sensitivity limit for Z = 114 was observed, which may be due to the neutron deficiency of the formed isotopes.