Quantum entanglement in nuclear fission

IF 4.3 2区物理与天体物理 Q1 ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS

Physics Letters B Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI:10.1016/j.physletb.2025.139248

Yu Qiang , Junchen Pei , Kyle Godbey

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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.

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核裂变中的量子纠缠

核裂变是强相互作用多体系统中量子纠缠的一个独特例子。在裂变过程中，重核可以分裂成数百种由两个互补碎片组成的组合。碎片波函数的纠缠态在分离后仍然存在，影响了碎片间粒子和能量的分配。基于240Pu裂变的微观动力学计算，本工作发现动态量子纠缠在碎片平均激发能的锯齿状分布和中子多重度的出现中是必不可少的，但在碎片的平均中子过剩中却不是。粒子数投影的两种锯齿状斜率都是陡峭的，这一特征可以通过随机波动来缓解。持续纠缠主要是由非绝热动力学引起的，因为最终分裂非常快，在分离过程中保持了波函数的非局域性。这些发现可能会更广泛地影响对介观系统中量子纠缠的理解。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Physics Letters B 物理-物理：综合

CiteScore

9.10

自引率

6.80%

发文量

647

审稿时长

3 months

期刊介绍： Physics Letters B ensures the rapid publication of important new results in particle physics, nuclear physics and cosmology. Specialized editors are responsible for contributions in experimental nuclear physics, theoretical nuclear physics, experimental high-energy physics, theoretical high-energy physics, and astrophysics.