Role of giant resonance excitation in heavy ion collisions

In this paper we discuss several aspects of heavy ion collisions involving collective vibrational modes. In our approach the relative motion is treated in a semiclassical approximation, while the intrinsic degrees of freedom are described microscopically within the RPA. The differences with respect to macroscopic models are analyzed in the appendix. First we present some results on the inelastic scattering cross section and we show that the structures observed experimentally can be explained in terms of multiple excitation of the Giant Quadrupole Resonance. After we calculate an adiabatic polarization potential describing the coupling to the collective vibrational modes and show that it produces a strong enhancement of the subbarrier fusion cross section. This enhancement is found to be enough to reproduce the experimental data for symmetric systems, while for asymmetric reactions the coupling to other degrees of freedom, like transfer, is needed. Finally we report some preliminary results on a dynamical calculation of the real and imaginary parts of the polarization potential. We show that at high incident energies (E/A > 20MeV) the role of the Giant Quadrupole Resonance becomes dominant