The role of surface diffuseness in heavy-ion fusion barriers studies

The study of heavy-ion fusion barriers and cross sections has attracted a lot of attention in recent years because it is quite useful for the understanding of structural effects, production of superheavy elements and cluster-decay studies. At the same time, it is closely related with nucleus-nucleus interaction potential. Therefore, a systematic study of fusion barrier is of great importance to check the various theoretical nucleus-nucleus interaction potentials and to explore the global features of fusion barriers. As is clear from literature, lot of experimental data is available on fusion barriers and cross sections. One should keep in mind that no experiment measures the barrier of a reaction directly. In all experiments involving the fusion mechanism, one often measures the differential cross sections and then using suitable theoretical approach, one can extract barrier parameters