Deep inelastic collisions between very heavy nuclei

A systematic survey of deep inelastic reactions was performed for colliding nuclei of masses between 80 and 240 amu. The application of large surface detectors and, particularly, of a position sensitive ionization chamber, has proved to be very effective and appropriate for this type of investigation. The Wilczynski diagrams describing the relative motion between the colliding objects shows a gradual trend as a function of growing masses of target and projectile where the trajectories lead the particles not toward negative scattering angles but increasingly into the direction around and above the grazing angle. This behavior is attributed to a delicate balance between Coulomb and nuclear forces. The energy dumping as a function of the mass transfer strength matches a general law between total kinetic energy loss and the variance of the proton number distribution. For the partly damped component this relation seems to hold independently from the choice of ingoing channel and bombarding energy. The dissipation of the kinetic energy does not depend only on the relative velocity of the impinging nuclei, and the simple friction model is not appropriate to describe these processes. The γ-multiplicity measurement displays a rapid increase as a function of scattering angle and total kinetic energy loss, which give new insights to the process and indicate the necessity of microscopic quantum mechanical calculations of the interaction. In the U-U collision large mass transfers are present which possibly populate with relatively large cross sections the transuranic elements. In the Pb-Pb reaction the mass transfer is more restricted. The decay probability by fission of the primary masses increases strongly for growing masses and excitation energies