Total reaction cross section of light stable and exotic nuclei on lead at energies around the Coulomb barrier

Abstract The present review studies total reaction cross sections from elastic scattering angular distributions of light stable and exotic projectiles ( $$2 \le Z_P \le 10$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> <mml:mo>≤</mml:mo> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>Z</mml:mi> <mml:mi>P</mml:mi> </mml:msub> <mml:mo>≤</mml:mo> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , $$4 \le A_P \le 24$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>4</mml:mn> <mml:mo>≤</mml:mo> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>A</mml:mi> <mml:mi>P</mml:mi> </mml:msub> <mml:mo>≤</mml:mo> <mml:mn>24</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> ) on 208 Pb at energies around the Coulomb barrier. From the overall about 200 data it is found that the widely accepted simple grouping of the derived reduced cross sections into three categories—tightly bound, weakly bound, and exotic halo projectiles—is too simplistic and does not fully reflect the range of the experimental data. Furthermore, the energy dependence of the reduced cross sections shows unexpected properties which were hitherto only sparsely considered.