Simulations of fission fragments in VERDI : A study of the Plasma Delay Time phenomenon

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this project is to study the plasma delay time phenomenon in preparation for the construction of the VERDI spectrometer. To accomplish this, simulations of the spontaneous fissioning process of Cf-252 were created using the fission code GEF, as well as MATLAB. GEF has produced one million fission events, from which the time of flight and kinetic energy of each fission fragment have been calculated with classical mechanics, to replicate the experiment. To imitate the plasma delay time phenomenon, three different models, found in the literature, have been compared. Accounting for other realistic resolution effects and using the first model as the plasma delay time phenomenon, the absolute errors of the mass-yields reaches up to 4 u, whereas the second and third model display absolute errors up to 3 u. Furthermore, it is found that, despite the significant differences in the models' dependencies, the resulting effects are quite similar. All models are found to have a narrowing influence on the pre-neutron emission mass- yield distributions, resulting in an increased peak-to-valley ratio. In the detection of fission fragments, a higher peak-to-valley resolution is often associated with a better mass resolution. This study shows that the plasma delay time could have a misleading influence in regards to estimating an experimental mass resolution.