Influence of nuclear matter properties on heavy-ion sub-barrier fusion reactions

Abstract

Interactions between two nuclei in nuclear reactions are calculated by applying the energy density method to nuclear energy density functionals. We particularly focus on the effects of nuclear mat- ter properties on fusion reactions by using the Korea-IBS-Daegu-SKKU (KIDS) density functional. Uncertainty of the equation of state in symmetric nuclear matter is accounted for by using different values of the incompressibility and the effect is explored with the 40Ca+40Ca system. Though not prominent, a systematic dependence on the incompressibility can be inferred from the fusion cross sections. The effect of asymmetric nuclear matter is described by adopting the symmetry energy parameters that are consistent with the neutron star data, but still have large uncertainties. In the application to the 48Ca+48Ca and 16O+208Pb systems, we observe a systematic dependence on the stiffness of the symmetry energy. We also consider the uncertainty of the effective mass of the nucleon in nuclear medium. We employ models that have isoscalar and isovector effective masses varying from minimum to maximum values in the allowed ranges. Contrary to incompressibility and symmetry energy, fusion cross sections are insensitive to the isoscalar and isovector effective masses. Without any phenomenological adjustment or modification of the model, fusion processes are described accurately by applying the interaction potentials derived from nuclear structure mod- els