Even-odd Effect in Fission-fragment Z Yields - A New Kind of Nuclear Clock

It is shown that the recently proposed sorting of intrinsic excitation energy in fission dynamics under the influence of pairing correlations explains the complex features of even-odd structure in fission-fragment yields. A schematic dynamical scenario is proposed. It reveals that the variation of the even-odd effect with the Coulomb parameter of the compound nucleus and the increase towards asymmetric splits carries information on several dynamical times. This new insight stresses the importance of nuclear fission as a laboratory for studying the dynamics of non-equilibrium processes in mesoscopic objects under the influence of residual interactions.