Orientation dependence of the heavy-ion potential between two deformed nuclei

Abstract

The deformation and orientation dependence of the real part of the interaction potential is studied for two heavy deformed nuclei using the Hamiltonian energy density approach derived from the well-known Skyrme NN interaction with two parameter sets SIII and SkM * . We studied the real part of the heavy ion (HI) potential for 238 U+ 238 U pair considering quadrupole and hexadecapole deformations in both nuclei and taking into consideration all the possible orientations, coplanar and noncoplanar, of the two interacting nuclei. We found strong orientation dependence for the physically significant region of the HI potential. The orientation dependence increases with adding the hexadecapole deformation. The azimuthal angle dependence is found to be strong for some orientations. This shows that taking the two system axes in one plane produces a large error in calculating the physical quantities.

α decay as a probe of nuclear incompressibility

“…The existence of the shallow pocket in the ion-ion potential is related to such evidence as the resonant structures in the collisions of light [57] and heavy [58,59] nuclei, cluster radioactivity [60], and binary and ternary cold fragmentations of heavy nuclei [51]. Furthermore, the existence of pockets in the entrance channel potentials is crucial for the fusion reactions [61][62][63] and the observed fusion windows for superheavy elements synthesis [64,65]. In a recent work [6], a potential with a thick barrier and shallow pocket, produced with M3Y-Reid effective NN forces supplemented with a repulsive core, is used to explain the steep falloff of fusion cross sections at energies far below the Coulomb barrier.…”

Effect of octupole and higher deformations on Coulomb barrier

“…It has been shown both theoretically and experimentally that the sub barrier fusion of spherical and well deformed nuclei is strongly enhanced by deformation [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. It has long been recognized that the presence of deformation affects the height of Coulomb barrier, its position and its thickness which are especially important quantities for the production of the super-heavy elements [14][15][16]. Recently, particular interest has been paid to the effects of nuclear deformation on the formation and decay of the super-heavy nuclei (SHN) [12,15,17,18].…”

“…For spherical-deformed and deformed-deformed pairs of nuclei, the exact Coulomb potential is calculated in the frame work of the double folding model from a six-dimensional integral [21,22] while the nuclear contribution of the interaction potential can be derived using different models. Double folding model [23,24] and energy density formalism [16,25] are the most commonly used methods in calculating the nuclear contribution of nucleus-nucleus potential. For two spherical nuclei, the folding model can be simplified to integration over the product of one-dimensional integrals [23,24].…”

Interaction of two deformed, arbitrarily oriented nuclei

“…The Coulomb part is related to a six-dimensional integral [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. The nuclear part of a nucleus-nucleus potential is given by six-or threedimensional integrals in the framework of various models [24,[26][27][28][30][31][32][33][34]. The evaluation of these integrals is an intricate numerical problem, especially when the ground states of interacting nuclei are well deformed.…”