Fusion of weakly bound nuclei

We discuss the effect of the break-up of weakly bound nuclei on the fusion cross section of these projectiles with light, medium and heavy mass targets, at energies close to the Coulomb barrier. The discussion is based mostly on data obtained by our group in collaborative experiments. We also show that the break-up process at near and sub-barrier energies is responsible for the vanishing of the usual threshold anomaly of the optical potential.