Fragmentation of spherical radioactive heavy nuclei as a novel probe of transient effects in fission

Peripheral collisions with radioactive heavy-ion beams at relativistic energies are discussed as an innovative approach for probing the transient regime experienced by fissile systems evolving toward quasiequilibrium and thereby studying the viscous nature of nuclear matter. A dedicated experiment using the advanced technical installations of GSI, Darmstadt, made it possible to realize ideal conditions for the investigation of relaxation effects in a metastable well. Combined with a highly sensitive experimental signature, it provides a measure of the transient effects with respect to the flux over the fission barrier. Within a two-step reaction process, 45 proton-rich unstable spherical isotopes between At and Th produced by projectile-fragmentation of a stable U-238 beam have been used as secondary projectiles which impinge on lead target nuclei. The fragmentation of the radioactive projectiles results in nearly spherical compound nuclei that span a wide range in excitation energy and fissility. The decay of these excited systems by fission is studied with a dedicated setup which, together with the inverse kinematics of the reaction, permits the detection of both fission products in coincidence and the determination of their atomic numbers with high resolution. The information on the nuclear charges of the two fragments is used to sort the data according to the initial excitation energy and fissility of the compound nucleus. The width of the fission-fragment nuclear charge distribution is shown to be specifically sensitive to presaddle transient effects and is used to establish a clock for the passage of the saddle point. The comparison of the experimental results with model calculations points to a fission delay tau(trans) of (3.3 +/- 0.7) x 10(-21) s for initially spherical compound nuclei, independent of excitation energy and fissility. This value suggests a nuclear dissipation strength beta at small deformation of (4.5 +/- 0.5) x 10(21) s(-1). The very specific combination of the physics and technical equipment exploited in this work sheds light on previous controversial conclusions, which were drawn without considering the influence of the initial conditions.