One- and two-body dissipation in heavy-ion collisions

A microscopic theory has been formulated for one- and two-body dissipation in collisions between two heavy nuclei. With a nucleon-nucleon interaction as the basic perturbation in a density matrix approach with “linear response” approximations, the one- and two-body nuclear friction coefficients for the ⁴⁰Ca + ⁴⁰Ca system have been calculated and their dependence on relative kinetic energy and smearing of nuclear single-particle states was obtained. The results of our calculation show that: (a) the combined one- and two-body friction coefficients compare favourably with phenomenological values, (b) the one-body dissipation is more effective than two-body in kinetic energy damping, while both the mechanisms are comparable for the damping of relative angular momentum, (c) the importance of the two-body friction compared to one-body increases at higher relative kinetic energies and (d) the effect of introducing a smearing in nuclear levels appears as a lowering of nuclear friction.