A detailed understanding of complete fusion cross sections in heavy-ion
collisions requires a consideration of the effects of the deformation of the
projectile and target. Our aim here is to show that deformation and orientation
of the colliding nuclei have a very significant effect on the fusion-barrier
height and on the compactness of the touching configuration. To facilitate
discussions of fusion configurations of deformed nuclei, we develop a
classification scheme and introduce a notation convention for these
configurations. We discuss particular deformations and orientations that lead
to compact touching configurations and to fusion-barrier heights that
correspond to fairly low excitation energies of the compound systems. Such
configurations should be the most favorable for producing superheavy elements.
We analyse a few projectile-target combinations whose deformations allow
favorable entrance-channel configurations and whose proton and neutron numbers
lead to compound systems in a part of the superheavy region where alpha
half-lives are calculated to be observable, that is, longer than 1 microsecond.Comment: 15 pages. LaTeX with iopconf.sty style file. Presented at 2nd
RIKEN/INFN Joint Symposium, Wako-shi, Saitama, Japan, May 22-26, 1995. To be
published in symposium proceedings by World Scientific, Singapore. Seven
figures not included here. PostScript version with figures available at
http://t2.lanl.gov/pub/publications/publications.html or at
ftp://t2.lanl.gov/pub/publications/riken9
