The impact of real-time dynamical effects in heavy-ion fusion

Fusion reactions involving neutron rich nuclei will be one of the forefront research areas at radioactive ion-beam facilities. Over the last decade, major strides have been made in the microscopic description of heavy-ion fusion. The underlying physics of many phenomenological methods and their shortcomings are better understood and new methods have been developed. This was also greatly facilitated by experiments that pushed the limits of the theory. The talk will provide an overview of these recent developments. In particular, methods employing real-time dynamics to calculate ion-ion interaction potentials, that include Pauli antisymmetrization, exchange of nucleons through the formation of a neck, and excitation will be discussed. We will show how Pauli exclusion induces a "Pauli repulsion" in the interaction between di-nuclear systems. We investigate the proton and neutron contributions to the Pauli repulsion, both in the bare potential neglecting shape polarization and transfer between the reactants, as well as in the dynamical potential obtained by accounting for such dynamical rearrangements.