Fusion at sub-coulomb energies

Nuclear reactions among light heavy nuclei at sub-Coulomb energies are recently gaining interest due to their astrophysical significance. Yet, their importance for conventional Nuclear-Physics is by no means small. At this regime of low energy, the fusion cross-section sigmasub(F) exhaust almost all the reaction cross-section sigmasub(R), and the sensitivity of sigmasub(F) to the position of the inner classical turning point leads to the some-what paradoxical conclusion that incident beams of lower energy probe the nuclear interaction at shorter distances. (orig.)