Study of fission of exotic actinides by relativistic reactions

SOFIA (Studies On FIssion with Aladin) is an innovative experimental program which aims to measure several fission observables — the isotopic fission yields, the total kinetic energy of the fragments and the prompt neutron multiplicity, for a wide range of actinides and pre-actinides. The use of inverse kinematics (the fissioning system is the beam instead of the target) is the only way to fully identify fragments in charge and mass. The PhD work presented in this thesis concerns the experiment conducted in October 2014, and is focused on the Coulomb-induced fission of ² ³ ⁶ U, which can be regarded as the analog of the neutron-induced fission of ² ³⁵U.The SOFIA experiments take place in GSI (Darmstadt, Germany) because it is the sole facility in the world which delivers a beam of ² ³⁸U at 1 AGeV. This beam is fragmented and the products are selected by the FRS (FRagment separator) in order to deliver a secondary beam of nuclei of interest - ² ³ ⁶ U in our case, which is then guided to the SOFIA setup where its fission is triggered.Since some nuclides with close atomic and mass numbers to ² ³ ⁶ U are also transmitted by the FRS, it is necessary to identify the fissioning system from the secondary beam first, and then identify both the associated fission fragments. All identifications are performed event by event on the basis of measurements of the energy loss, the magnetic rigidity and the time of flight. Since we are only interested in the Coulomb-induced fission of ² ³ ⁶ U, the contribution of fragmentation fissions on the nuclear charge distribution of fission fragments has to be suppressed.The analysis in this paper involves the isotopic identification of the fissioning system, the nuclear charge identification of the fission fragments, the estimation of the nuclear contribution, and the extraction of the elemental fission yield. The results are then compared to other measurements performed with the SOFIA setup, as well as previous results obtained by other techniques.