Study of the threshold anomaly in systems involving weakly bound nuclei

Full text: One of the dominant mechanisms in systems involving weakly bound nuclei is the break-up channel; however, the dynamics of this process remains poorly understood. In elastic scattering of strongly bound nuclei it is clearly established that there is always a threshold anomaly (TA) in the optical potential. The TA is characterized by a localized peak in the real part of the potential and by a decrease of the imaginary part of the potential as the bombarding energy decreases towards the Coulomb barrier. But when at least one of the nuclei is weakly bound the results are different for different systems. Three kinds of situations have been reported: the usual TA is observed; the usual TA is not observed because the potentials are almost constant even close to the Coulomb barrier; the so-called Break up Threshold Anomaly (BTA), where the imaginary potential increases as the bombarding energy decreases towards the Coulomb barrier. The BTA is attributed to a strong coupling of the elastic channel with the breakup process, which might have a much larger cross section than fusion at sub-barrier energies. In order to understand how those differences are affected by the system properties it is important to have data of new systems available. In this work we contribute original elastic scattering data of the weakly bound 6,7Li projectiles on 144Sm at near coulomb barrier energies. The measurements have been performed at the TANDAR Laboratory using 6Li and 7Li beams and a 100 μg/cm2 thick 144Sm target. Eleven different bombarding energies between 21 and 42.3 MeV were used for each projectile. The results are analyzed using phenomenological optical potentials and compared with results from other systems involving weakly bound nuclei. (author)