Existence of a one-body barrier revealed in deep subbarrier fusion

Based on the adiabatic picture for heavy-ion reactions, in which the neck formation in the one-body system is taken into account, we propose a two-step model for fusion cross sections at deep sub-barrier energies. This model consists of the capture process in the two-body potential pocket, which is followed by the penetration of the adiabatic one-body potential to reach a compound state after the touching configuration. We describe the former process with the coupled-channels framework, while the latter with the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation by taking into account the coordinate dependent inertia mass. The effect of the one-body barrier is important at incident energies below the potential energy at the touching configuration. We show that this model well accounts for the steep fall-off phenomenon of fusion cross sections at deep sub-barrier energies for the ⁶⁴Ni+⁶⁴Ni and ⁵⁸Ni+⁵⁸Ni reactions.