Investigating the nucleus-nucleus potential at very short distances

Recent progress in experimental techniques have made possible accurate measurements of fusion cross sections far below the Coulomb barrier, revealing an unexpected behavior of these quantities as a function of the bombarding energy. Besides providing a plausible cause for the observed energy dependence we profit from the nature of this explanation and the high sensitivity of the experimental data to show how one can use these measurements to investigate the radial dependence of the nuclear ion-ion potential at extremely close distances.