Reduction Methods for Total Reaction Cross Sections

Abstract

The most frequently used methods to reduce fusion and total reaction excitation functions were investigated in a very recent paper Canto et al. (Phys Rev C 92:014626, 2015). These methods are widely used to eliminate the influence of masses and charges in comparisons of cross sections for weakly bound and tightly bound systems. This study reached two main conclusions. The first is that the fusion function method is the most successful procedure to reduce fusion cross sections. Applying this method to theoretical cross sections of single channel calculations, one obtains a system independent curve (the fusion function), that can be used as a benchmark to fusion data. The second conclusion was that none of the reduction methods available in the literature is able to provide a universal curve for total reaction cross sections. The reduced single channel cross sections keep a strong dependence of the atomic and mass numbers of the collision partners, except for systems in the same mass range. In the present work we pursue this problem further, applying the reduction methods to systems within a limited mass range. We show that, under these circumstances, the reduction of reaction data may be very useful.