Studies in nuclear macrophysics through fission and fission-like reactions

Abstract

Recent developments in the study of fission and fission-like reactions are briefly reviewed. After a brief introduction of some of the important features of the fission process, binary fission and fission-like processes in heavy ion-induced reactions are discussed. It is shown that studies of the fission fragment angular distributions which provide a way to determine relative contributions of compound nucleus fission and non-equilibrium fission-like events in heavy ion-induced fission have proved to be quite valuable in investigating the very short K-equilibration times of the order of 10^-20 s involved in the nuclear dynamics of the dinuclear complex on its way to compound nucleus formation following nucleus-nucleus collision.