  The fission process is a fascinating phenomenon in which the atomic nucleus,
a compact self-bound mesoscopic system, undergoes a spontaneous or induced
quantum transition into two or more fragments. A predictive, accurate and
precise description of nuclear fission, rooted in a fundamental quantum
many-body theory, is one of the biggest challenges in science. Current
approaches assume adiabatic motion of the system with internal degrees of
freedom at thermal equilibrium. With parameters adjusted to data, such
modelling works well in describing fission lifetimes, fragment mass
distributions, or their total kinetic energies. However, are the assumptions
valid? For the fission occurring at higher energies and/or shorter times, the
process is bound to be non-adiabatic and/or non-thermal. The vision of this
project is to go beyond these approximations, and to obtain a unified
description of nuclear fission at varying excitation energies. The key elements
of this project are the use of nuclear density functional theory with novel,
nonlocal density functionals and innovative high-performance computing
techniques. Altogether, the project aims at better understanding of nuclear
fission, where slow, collective, and semi-classical effects are intertwined
with fast, microscopic, quantum evolution.
