Nucleus-nucleus reactions near the coulomb barrier

Several attempts have been made to calculate the nucleus-nucleus potentials from first principles. While some progress has been made in this direction, a greater success has been met with semi-microscopic approaches which include details such as the sizes of the colliding nuclei (or the density distributions of the nuclei) and which introduce effective nucleon-nucleon interactions. The semi-microscopic approach has provided a very good first approximation to the real part of the nucleus-nucleus potentials. The author presents an overview of the general features of the ''optical-potential'' and focuses on the question of any correlations between the real and imaginary part of the optical potential