Scaling laws, transient times and shell effects in helium induced nuclear fission

Fission excitation functions of He-3 and He-4 induced compound nuclei are shown to scale exactly according to the Bohr-Wheeler transition state prediction once the shell effects are accounted for. The presented method furthermore allows one to model-independently extract values for the shell effects which are in good agreement to those obtained from liquid-drop model calculations. The fact that no deviations from the transition state method have been observed within the experimentally investigated excitation energy regime allows one to assign an upper limit for the transient time of 10 zs.