Cold binary and ternary fission

Summary Cold binary fission has been studied in the spontaneous decay of 252 Cf (sf). Cold fission for the mass split 132/120 is especially interesting because here it is the doubly magic 132 Sn which is dominating the yield for a range of total excitation energies 0 ≤ TXE ≤10MeV For the reaction 242 Am(n,f) induced by thermal neutrons the yields of the heaviest clusters being emitted as ternary particles have been investigated at the mass spectrometer Lohengrin of the Institut Laue-Langevin. The emission of the heaviest clusters ( 33, 34, 35 Si) is a cold process with all three reaction partners being born in or very close to their ground states.