Assessing the adequacy of the bare optical potential in near-barrier fusion calculation

We critically examine the differences among the different bare nuclear interactions used in near-barrier heavy-ion fusion analysis and coupled-channels calculations, and discuss the possibility of extracting the barrier parameters of the bare potential from above-barrier data. We show that the choice of the bare potential may be critical for the analysis of the fusion cross sections. Although this may seem trivial, several recent papers use different bare potentials and reach different conclusions, especially when weakly bound systems are considered and possible relatively small fusion cross section enhancements or suppressions are found. We show also that the barrier parameters taken from above-barrier data may be very wrong.