Reactions with weakly bound nuclei at near barrier energies

In reactions with weakly bound nuclei, the effect of breakup on fusion process has attracted much attention in recent years. The experimental study shows that breakup channel leads to suppression of complete fusion at above barrier energies due to loss of flux. The fusion barrier distribution can provide a further insight into understanding the influence of coupling to the breakup channels. Similar information could be obtained from the elastic and quasielastic (QEL) scattering because of the conservation of the reaction flux (i.e. R+T= 1), where R is the reflection probability and T is the transmission probability. Thus, quasi-elastic scattering at backward angles is the counterpart of the fusion process and it is expected that the barrier distributions extracted from two processes, namely, QEL and fusion should be similar. While this is true for tightly bound reaction systems, in reactions involving weakly bound projectiles significant differences have been observed for QEL barrier distributions with and without inclusion of breakup processes. This talk will present the recent results for fusion and quasi-elastic scattering in ^6,7Li + ¹⁹⁷Au system. Developmental efforts towards a momentum achromatic separator, MARIE, to extract projectile-like secondary ion beams following the reactions of heavy-ion beams from superconducting LINAC booster at Mumbai will also be presented. (author)