An outlook for fission cross-section theory and experiments on radioactive nuclei*

Understanding fission remains one of the most challenging problems in nuclear physics for both theorists and experimentalists. Surrogate reactions on radioactive nuclei present a unique opportunity to probe the effect of initial conditions, such as excitation energy, angular momentum, and parity, on fission probabilities and fission-fragment properties. These measurements provide in turn a critical testbed for dynamical theories of fission. In this talk, we will discuss some useful fission observables that surrogate reactions can provide, and we will review some of the theoretical approaches available to model the data. We will focus on the discrete-basis approach to scission dynamics we have been developing as a tool to interpret data from fission measurements on radioactive nuclei.