Speaker: Dr. Jørgen Randrup, Lawrence Berkeley National Laborator
Time: May 7, 2026, Thursday, 10:30 AM
Location: Lecture Hall 9409

Abstract：

Nuclear fission is a rich physical phenomenon involving strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions, and it displays classical as well as quantum features. In addition to its many practical aspects, fission is also of basic scientific interest. For example, the fragment yields influence the elemental abundances in the universe and also play a key role in studies of reactor neutrinos (e.g., at Daya Bay and JUNO). In particular, fission provides an excellent testing ground for models of collective nuclear dynamics. Because the nuclear many-body system is highly dissipative, the nuclear shape evolution is akin to Brownian motion, a feature that makes it possible to predict a variety of fission observables (such as the yields, excitations, and angular momenta of the fragments) and simulate the formation of superheavy nuclei in fusion reactions.

Speaker Profile：

Dr. Jørgen Randrup is a Senior Physicist (now Emeritus) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He studied at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and received his PhD in 1972, after which he did postdoctoral research in Berkeley (LBNL) and Copenhagen (the Niels Bohr Institute and NORDITA), before taking up his career position at LBNL. He has worked on a range of topics, mostly related to nuclear collisions at various energies, including transport processes in damped nuclear reactions, equilibration and particle production in relativistic nuclear collisions, spinodal instabilities in multi-fragmentation, dynamics of disoriented chiral condensates, and phase structure of the strong interaction. In recent years, he has focused on dynamics of warm nuclei, with particular application to fission, for which he has developed the Brownian shape evolution treatment.