Half-lives of trinuclear molecules - art. no. 044606

Recent discoveries of Be-10 and C-12 accompanied cold fission in the sponta neous fission of Cf-252 lead to the surprising result that long living trin uclear molecules may exists. For the description of the dynamics and decay of such molecules, we used a coplanar three body cluster model (two deforme d fragments and an alpha particle) with a three body potential computed by a double folding potential generated by M3Y effective interaction. A repuls ive compression term was included. The computed alpha ternary cold fission yields are in agreement with the experiment. The energy and angular distrib utions of the three clusters at infinity and the half-lives are strongly de pendent of the initial positions of the alpha particle relative to the two fragments and of mass asymmetry of the fragments. The evaluated lifetimes o f such trinuclear molecules are quite large, of the order of one second.