Abstract
In collisions of light, stable, weakly bound nuclides, complete fusion (capture of all of the projectile charge) has been found to be suppressed by $\ensuremath{\sim}30%$ at above-barrier energies. This is thought to be related to their low thresholds for breakup into charged clusters. The observation of fusion suppression in the neutron-rich radioactive nucleus $^{8}\mathrm{Li}$ is therefore puzzling: the lowest breakup threshold yields $^{7}\mathrm{Li}+n$ which cannot contribute to fusion suppression because $^{7}\mathrm{Li}$ retains all the projectile charge. In this work, the full characteristics of $^{8}\mathrm{Li}$ breakup in reactions with $^{209}\mathrm{Bi}$ are presented, including, for the first time, coincidence measurements of breakup into charged clusters. Correlations of cluster fragments show that most breakup occurs too slowly to significantly suppress fusion. However, a large cross section for unaccompanied $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ particles was found, suggesting that charge clustering, facilitating partial charge capture, rather than weak binding is the crucial factor in fusion suppression, which may therefore persist in exotic nuclides.
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