Nuclear reactions in collisions of very heavy ions at energies below and near the barrier

Cross sections for nuclear reactions in collisions of238U+238U and238U +197Au near and below the coulomb barrier

Cross sections for nuclear reactions at beam energies near and below the spherical Coulomb barrier V c were measured in the very heavy collision systems238U +238U and238U +197Au. The most probable reaction channel with mass transfer is the one-neutron transfer. Its excitation function is understood in terms of Rutherford trajectories together with the quantal process of neutron tunnelling over large distances. In addition, the exchange of up to 15 nucleons is observed down to 0.90 V c . The excitation functions for the multi-nucleon transfer products have much steeper slopes than that for one-neutron transfer, and are steeper for238U +197Au than for238U +238U, suggesting that nuclear contac…

Fission in238U+238U collisions below the Coulomb barrier

Integral fission cross sections in the system238U+238U were measured at beam energies below the interaction barrierVC. Scattering angle dependent probabilities and integral cross sections for Coulomb fission were calculated. It is concluded that earlier observed discrepancies between measured and calculated angular distributions for the one-neutron transfer product239U cannot be explained by sequential fission. Multi-nucleon transfer induced fission is observed down to energies (0.90±0.02)×VC.