Half-lives of trinuclear molecules

Recent discoveries of Be-10 and C-12 accompanied cold fission in the spontaneous fission of Cf-252 lead to the surprising result that long living trinuclear molecules may exists. For the description of the dynamics and decay of such molecules, we used a coplanar three body cluster model (two deformed fragments and an alpha particle) with a three body potential computed by a double folding potential generated by M3Y effective interaction. A repulsive compression term was included. The computed alpha ternary cold fission yields are in agreement with the experiment. The energy and angular distributions of the three clusters at infinity and the half-lives are strongly dependent of the initial positions of the alpha particle relative to the two fragments and of mass asymmetry of the fragments. The evaluated lifetimes of such trinuclear molecules are quite large, of the order of one second.