Evidence of Double Phonon Excitations in ^{16}O + ^{208}Pb Reaction

Abstract

The fusion cross-sections for ^{16}O + ^{208}Pb, measured to high precision, enable the extraction of the distribution of fusion barriers. This shows a structure markedly different from the single-barrier which might be expected for fusion of two doubly-closed shell nuclei. The results of exact coupled channel calculations performed to understand the observations are presented. These calculations indicate that coupling to a double octupole phonon excited state in ^{208}Pb is necessary to explain the experimental barrier distributions.

Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures, To be published in the Proceedings of the FUSION 97 Conference, South Durras, Australia, March 1997 (J. Phys. G)