New ideas on the production of heavy and superheavy neutron rich nuclei Original Research Article

A new way is proposed to discover and examine unknown neutron-rich heavy and superheavy (SH) nuclei at the “north-east” part of the nuclear map. These nuclei can be produced neither in fusion reactions nor in fragmentation processes widely used nowadays for production of new nuclei. The present limits of the upper part of the nuclear map are very close to stability while the unexplored area of heavy neutron-rich nuclides to the east of the stability line (also those located along the neutron closed shell N=126) is extremely important for nuclear astrophysics investigations and, in particular, for the understanding of the r-process of astrophysical nucleo-genesis. A novel idea is proposed for the production of these nuclei via low-energy multi-nucleon transfer reactions using a gain given by the shell effects. The estimated yields of neutron-rich nuclei are found to be rather high in such reactions and several tens of new nuclides can be produced, for example, in near-barrier collision of 136Xe with 208Pb. This finding may spur new studies at heavy ion facilities and should have significant impact for future experiments.