Investigations of structure effects in heavy-ion fusion above the Coulomb barrier

We investigated the occurrence of nuclear structure effects in the fusion of heavy ions at above-barrier energies. To unveil the presence of such tiny effects, we developed a semi-classical model based on the modified Sum-of-Difference method of nuclear reactions, able to reproduce the gross trend of the whole database available to date. The deviations between the model predictions and the data can be linked, at low bombarding energies, to the occurrence of shell closures; at larger energies, such effects are washed out, while phenomena due to the cluster structure of projectile or target are observed.