Quantum entanglement in nuclear fission

Release time:2026-01-21 Hits:

Impact Factor:4.5

Journal:Physics Letters B

Key Words:Nuclear fission, entanglement entropy, sawtooth structure

Abstract:Nuclear fission presents a unique example of quantum entanglement in strongly interacting many-body systems. A heavy nucleus can split into hundreds of combinations of two complementary fragments in the fission process. The entanglement of fragment wave functions is persistent even after separation and impacts the partition of particles and energies between fragments. Based on microscopic dynamical calculations of the fission of 240Pu, this work finds that dynamical quantum entanglement is indispensable in the appearance of sawtooth distributions of average excitation energies of fragments and thus neutron multiplicities, but not in average neutron excess of fragments. Both sawtooth slopes from particle-number projections are found to be steep -- a feature which can be alleviated by random fluctuations. The persistent entanglement is mainly due to non-adiabatic dynamics since the final splitting is so fast that the non-localization of wave functions is kept during the separation. These findings may impact the understanding of quantum entanglement more broadly in mesoscopic systems.

Co-author:Kyle Godbey

First Author:Yu Qiang

Indexed by:Journal paper

Correspondence Author:JunChen Pei

First-Level Discipline:Physics

Document Type:J

Volume:861

Page Number:139248

Translation or Not:no

Date of Publication:2025-01-07

Included Journals:SCI

Links to published journals:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2025.139248