“Elastic fission” of very light nuclear systems

The binary decay of very light nuclear systems into the ground state exit channel has been investigated for light heavy-ion collisions at energies ranging from the Coulomb barrier up to ∼4 MeV per nucleon. A systematic analysis of 14 reactions and up to 50 angular distributions allowed the extraction of the energy thresholds (E_ef) for the fission channel forming the final products at the ground state (“elastic fission”). A significant suppression of the contribution of statistical processes is observed when the size of the system is reduced. This effect may be related to a relative increase of the fast and peripheral yields.