X-Rays from Fission

The report is on the activities pursued during the first six months of the third year contract X-Rays from Fission. The main effort during this part of the contract has been the construction and testing of a time-of-flight tube and the testing of the associated electronics and detectors. Much of the effort during the previous two contract years has been to study fission yields from experiments in which fragment mass was not determined directly. These experiments involved coincidence measurements between X-rays andor gamma-rays. During the course of these experiments it was found that the K-X-rays and gamma-rays emitted at the time of fission come primarily from nuclear, rather than atomic, processes. Since nuclear properties vary in no systematic fashion from one nucleus to another, these types of experiments are not now being pursued because the extraction of fission isotopic yields from such experiments appears to be in the distant future.