Role of fragment orientations in the formation of fusion valleys of superheavy elements

Abstract

The dependence of the heavy-ion interaction on the orientation is investigated for the cold fusion of two (spherical or deformed) nuclei leading to a superheavy element. In contrast to the case of cold fission, when the fragments are exclusively emerging at scission in pole-pole configuration, in the case of cold fusion the fragments are not necessarily limited to a particular reciprocal orientation and capture can occur also for configurations other than the pole-pole configuration. The occurrence of minima in the driving potential as a function of the interfragment distance and of the mass asymmetry is discussed for several orientations.