Cross sections for the production of superheavy nuclei

Abstract Production and studying properties of superheavy (SH) nuclei meet significant experimental difficulties owing to extremely low cross sections of their formation in heavy ion fusion or multinucleon transfer reactions. Accurate predictions of these cross sections along with the corresponding excitation functions are quite desirable for planning and performing experiments of such kind. Study of these cross sections (their dependence on projectile–target combination and energy dependence) gives us an opportunity to investigate complicated dynamics of low-energy heavy ion collisions as well as decay properties of excited SH nuclei.