In a first study of its kind, a team led by the University of Washington’s Aurel Bulgac captured the real-time dynamics of a fissioning plutonium-240 nucleus by simulating the process on the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility. To create feasible nuclear fission models for current supercomputers, nuclear physicists had to devise shortcuts that often rely on approximations and constraints. The most successful of these approaches, density functional theory (DFT), describes nuclear dynamics by tracking changes in the density of the nucleus. To apply this method to fissile elements like uranium and plutonium, which contain more than 200 protons and neutrons, scientists need to extend the method to superfluid nuclei and then implement and validate DFT on leadership-class supercomputers. Read more at https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/07/26/titan-simulation-reveals-new-details-fissioning-plutonium-240/