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A series of experiments at the ALTO particle accelerator facility in Orsay, France, has revealed that the fragments resulting from nuclear fission obtain their intrinsic angular momentum (or spin) after fission, not before, as is widely assumed. This result was made possible by the nu-ball collaboration, an international group of nuclear physicists from 37 institutes and 16 countries - among them scientists from TU Darmstadt s Institute of Nuclear Physics - which studied a wide range of nuclei and their structure. The collaboration is led by the Irène-Joliot-Curie Laboratory in Orsay.
Open questions since the 1930s
Nuclear fission, in which a heavy nucleus splits in two and releases energy, was already discovered at the end of the 1930s by the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, and interpreted correctly by the physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. However, open questions about the process persist to this day. The new scientific study addresses the question