Effect of octupole and higher deformations on Coulomb barrier

The effect of octupole deformation, β3, and the higher multipole deformations, β6 and β8, on the distribution of barriers in orientation degrees of freedom, is studied. Coulomb barriers are derived in the frame work of the double folding model with the realistic M3Y nucleon–nucleon interaction and its density dependent version. 48Ca + 244Pu spherical-deformed nuclear interacting pair is considered, as an example, to study the effect of deformation parameters on the height and position of the Coulomb barrier. Although the dependence of the Coulomb barrier parameters on the higher deformations is complicated, numerically, if it is treated in microscopic way, we found a simple linear variation of barrier parameters with the different orders of deformation. We found that the variation of the barrier parameters with deformation exactly follows the change of the half density radius of the deformed nucleus in the direction of the separation vector between the centers of mass of the interacting nuclei. This suggests a simple and straightforward way to predict the behavior of the barrier parameters with different orders of deformations. We compared the results of present work with a similar recent study of the same quantities based on simple expression derived by Wong for the Coulomb part and proximity approach for the nuclear part of heavy ion potential, respectively.