Tunneling through a parabolic barrier coupled to an oscillatory degree of freedom: Application to heavy-ion fusion at sub-barrier energies

We performed studies of the transmission through a parabolic barrier coupled to a harmonic oscillator degree of freedom. We propose a model to include the effects of the excitation energy in a context similar to that of the frozen approximation. The model results in accurate approximations for the transmission coefficient and it is tested in the description of the heavy-ion fusion.