Extended Hauser-Feshbach method for statistical binary decay of light-mass systems

An extended Hauser-Feshbach method (EHFM) is developed for light heavy-ion fusion reactions in order to provide a detailed analysis of all the possible decay channels by including explicitly the fusion-fission phase space in the description of the cascade chain. The mass-asymmetric fission component is considered as a complex-fragment binary decay which can be treated in the same way as the light-particle evaporation from the compound nucleus in statistical-model calculations. The method of the phase-space integrations for the binary decay is an extension of the usual Hauser-Feshbach formalism to be applied to the mass-symmetric fission part. The EHFM calculations include ground-state binding energies and discrete levels in the low-excitation-energy regions which are essential for an accurate evaluation of the phase-space integrations of the complex-fragment emission (fission). In the present calculations, the EHFM is applied to the first-chance binary decay by assuming that the second-chance fission decay is negligible. In a similar manner to the description of the fusion-evaporation process, the usual cascade calculation of light-particle emission from the highly excited complex fragments is applied. This complete calculation is then defined as EHFM+cascade. Calculated quantities such as charge-, mass, and kinetic-energy distributions are compared with inclusive and/or exclusive data for the ³²S+²⁴Mg and ³⁵Cl+¹²C reactions which have been selected as typical examples. Finally, the missing charge distributions extracted from exclusive measurements are also successfully compared with the EHFM+cascade predictions.