The Fusion of Stable Weakly Bound Nuclei

We discuss our present understanding of the effect of the break-up of stable weakly bound nuclei on the fusion cross section of these projectiles with light, medium and heavy mass targets, at energies above the Coulomb barrier. The discussion is based mostly on data obtained by our group in collaborative experiments. We show that for heavy targets there is complete fusion suppression, corresponding to the occurrence of incomplete fusion of one of the break-up fragments, whereas for medium and light mass targets, there is no such effect, due to the negligible incomplete fusion process.