Heavy-ion reactions in time-dependent Hartree-Fock

Nuclear collisions at low energies present a unique opportunity for the study of degenerate Fermi systems far from equilibrium. Their behavior shows a rich variety: from complete fusion through highly nonelastic collisions to grazing situations with a complicated interplay of collective and single-particle degrees of freedom. The time-dependent Hartree-Fock approximation assumes a dominance of Pauli exclusion, ignoring the two-body collisions and instead using the mean field as the dominant dynamic quantity. For a class of zero-range effective interactions (the so-called Skyrme forces) it is possible to numerically solve the equations of motion to obtain a description of reactions that is parameter-free in the sense that the forces are fitted exclusively to nuclear ground-state properties. In this talk I give an overview of the theoretical issues, ignoring much of the technical detail of nuclear theory involved in such studies, and instead concentrating on the interesting consequences of the nonlinear coupling through the mean field: the spurious interaction between the different exit channels, the "one-body dissipation" mechanism and the essential semiclassical nature of the approach.