Heavy-ion induced fission reactions at near-barrier energies — what have we learnt?

Systematic studies of heavy-ion induced fission reactions at near-barrier energies carried out in the last decade have brought out many interesting aspects of fission process in general. The recent experimental findings which show dependence of fission fragment angular distributions on entrance channel, shape, size and spin of the interacting nuclei and shell closure of the intermediate compound nucleus are summarised in the present paper.