Theory of complete and incomplete fusion of weakly bound systems

Abstract

We propose a new method to evaluate complete and incomplete fusion in collisions of weakly bound nuclei. The method is applied to the Li7+209Bi system and the results are compared to experimental data. The overall agreement between theory and experiment is extremely good, above and below the Coulomb barrier. This suggests that 7Li breakup is the mechanism responsible for the suppression of complete fusion in this collision. We point out that this conclusion is not inconsistent with the assumption that the suppression arises from stripping processes, provided that they correspond to transfer reactions to the continuum of the target.