Fision: Nucleon pair breaking before scission

Abstract

In order to explain the odd-even effect observed in low energy fission fragment distributions it has been recently required a double mechanism of nucleon pair breaking: before scission (early pair breaking) and at scission (late pair breaking), respectively. In the present work we show that, using the same formulae but considering only the early pair breaking mechanism, one can reproduce fairly well all the available experimental data on the odd-even effects.