The influence of the 2-neutron elastic transfer on the fusion of 42Ca + 40Ca

Strong coupling to a single channel with zero Q-value is predicted to produce a characteristic fusion barrier distribution with two peaks, one on each side of the original uncoupled Coulomb barrier. In practical cases, only coupling to an elastic transfer channel may produce such a distribution which, however, has never been observed sofar, probably because low-lying surface vibrations usually have a dominant role, and this may obscure the two-peak structure. The case of the two-neutron (2n) elastic transfer in 42Ca + 40Ca is particularly attractive, because of the relatively rigid nature of the two nuclei. We have measured the fusion excitation function of this system using the 42Ca beam of the XTU Tandem of LNL on a thin 40Ca target enriched to 99.96% in mass 40. Cross sections have been measured down to ≤1 mb. The extracted barrier distribution shows clearly two main peaks. We have performed preliminary CC calculations where the 2+ coupling strengths have been taken from the literature and the schematic 2n pair transfer form factor has been used, with a deformation length δt= 0.39 fm. The excitation function is well reproduced by the calculation including the 2n transfer channel. However, including the octupole excitations destroys the agreement.