Coulomb and Nuclear Breakup at Low Energies: Scaling Laws

¹ Instituto de Estudos Avançados and Instituto de Física, Universidade de São Paulo, CP 66318, cep 05314-970, São Paulo, S.P., Brazil
² Instituto de Fisica, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Av. Litoranea s/n, Niteroe, R.J. 24210-340, Brazil
³ Instituto de Fisica, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, CP 68528, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

^a e-mail: hussein@if.usp.br
^b e-mail: paulogom@if.uff.br
^c e-mail: lubian@if.uff.br
^d e-mail: canto@if.ufrj.br

Published online: 19 December 2013

Abstract

We report on a recent work on the low-energy behavior of the breakup cross section in so far as it has important role in the fusion of weakly bound and halo nuclei at near-barrier energies. We assess the way the nuclear component of this cross section scales with the target mass. In complete accord with previous finding at higher energies we verify that the low energy behavior of the breakup cross section for a given projectile and relative center of mass energy with respect to the Coulomb barrier height scales as the cubic root of the mass number of the target. Surprisingly we find that the Coulomb component of the breakup cross section at these low energies also obeys scaling, but with a linear dependence on the target charge. Our findings are important when planning for experiments involving these exotic nuclei.