MEASURING CAPTURE CROSS SECTIONS FOR HEAVY-ELEMENT PRODUCTION

The creation of the nucleus of a superheavy element follows an extremely complex reaction path starting with the crossing of an external potential barrier (or distribution of barriers). This is followed by the evolution towards an equilibrated compound nucleus, which takes place in competition with pre-compound-nucleus fission (quasi-fission). Once formed the equilibrated compound nucleus must still survive against true fusion to yield a relatively long-lived evaporation residue. Much of this path is poorly understood, though recently, progress has been made on the role of the entrance-channel in quasi-fission. This will be briefly reported and a method proposed to measure the total capture cross section for such systems directly.