Coulomb and Nuclear Breakup at Low Energies: Scaling Laws

Abstract

We report on a recent work on the low-energy behavior of the breakup cross section in so far as it has important role in the fusion of weakly bound and halo nuclei at near-barrier energies. We assess the way the nuclear component of this cross section scales with the target mass. In complete accord with previous finding at higher energies we verify that the low energy behavior of the breakup cross section for a given projectile and relative center of mass energy with respect to the Coulomb barrier height scales as the cubic root of the mass number of the target. Surprisingly we find that the Coulomb component of the breakup cross section at these low energies also obeys scaling, but with a linear dependence on the target charge. Our findings are important when planning for experiments involving these exotic nuclei.