Coupling effect in the ²⁸Si+¹⁵⁴Sm reaction: a study through quasi-elastic scattering

Understanding the couplings to collective states of the interacting nuclei in fusion mechanism is important as they influence the barrier height and the formation probability of the compound nuclei, which in turn may be related to the synthesis of super heavy elements (SHEs) in heavier systems. With the motive to investigate such couplings, we obtain an experimental signature of coupling to ²⁸Si projectile and ¹⁵⁴Sm target excitation through barrier distribution (BD) study. To this end, the BDs of the ²⁸Si + ¹⁵⁴Sm and ¹⁶O + ¹⁵⁴Sm systems have been compared using quasi-elastic (QE) scattering data prior to perform the coupled channel calculations. For the ²⁸Si + ¹⁵⁴Sm system, the QE data is measured in the present work, however, for the ¹⁶O projectile data is taken from the literature