EPJ Web of Conferences 123, 03005 (2016)
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201612303005

Nuclear structure effects in quasifission – understanding the formation of the heaviest elements

Department of Nuclear Physics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia

^a e-mail: david.hinde@anu.edu.au
^b Current address: BARC, Mumbai, India
^c Current address: National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, MSU, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA
^d Current address: TIFR, Mumbai, India

Published online: 5 September 2016

Abstract

Quasifission is an important process suppressing the fusion of two heavy nuclei in reactions used to create superheavy elements. Quasifission results in rapid separation of the dinuclear system initially formed at contact. Achieving reliable a priori prediction of quasifission probabilities is a very diffcult problem. Through measurements with projectiles from C to Ni, the Australian National University’s Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility and CUBE spectrometer have been used to map out mass-angle distributions (MAD) - the fission mass-ratio as a function of centre-of-mass angle. These provide information on quasifission dynamics in the least modeldependent way. Average quasifission time-scales have been extracted, and compared with TDHF calculations of the collisions, with good agreement being found. With the baseline information from the survey of experimental MAD, strong influences of the nuclear structure of the projectile and target nuclei can be clearly determined.