Is friction responsible for the reduction of fusion rates far below the Coulomb barrier?

The fusion of two interacting heavy ions traditionally has been interpreted in terms of the penetration of the projectile into the target. Observed rates well below the Coulomb barrier are considerably lower than estimates obtained from penetration factors. One approach in the analysis of the data invokes coupling to non-elastic channels in the scattering as the source of the depletion. Another is to analyze those data in terms of tunneling in semi-classical models, with the observed depletion being taken as evidence of a ``friction'' under the barrier. A complementary approach is to consider such tunneling in terms of a fully quantal model. We investigate tunneling with both one-dimensional and three-dimensional models in a fully quantal approach to investigate possible sources for such a friction. We find that the observed phenomenon may not be explained by friction. However, we find that under certain conditions tunneling may be enhanced or diminished by up to 50%, which finds analogy with observation, without the invocation of a friction under the barrier.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures embedde

Open problems in nuclear density functional theory

This note describes five subjects of some interest for the density functional theory in nuclear physics. These are, respectively, i) the need for concave functionals, ii) the nature of the Kohn-Sham potential for the radial density theory, iii) a proper implementation of a density functional for an "intrinsic" rotational density, iv) the possible existence of a potential driving the square root of the density, and v) the existence of many models where a density functional can be explicitly constructed.Comment: 10 page