Multi-Nucleon Transfer Reactions and the Creation and the Evolution of the Compound Nucleus

There is no microscopic quantum approach based on the many-body time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation which capable to describe the formation and the evolution of a compound nucleus. The most advanced microscopic approach developed so far to describe multi-nucleon transfer (MNT) reactions in complex nuclear systems (with total number of nucleons $\gg 100$) is the time-dependent Hartree Fock (TDHF) mean field theory. In any mean field approach, however, the mean field is an expectation value of a quantum operator, thus classical in nature and unable to describe its quantum fluctuations, which are often expected to be crucial. Quantum fluctuations can be in principle be included in a configuration interaction (CI) framework, which in the case of reactions has to be implemented in the continuum. Here we describe the first such implementation within a novel extension of the well known Generator Coordinate Method (GCM), dubbed the enhanced GCM (eGCM), applied to the MNT reaction $^{48}$Ca+$^{208}$Pb near the Coulomb barrier, which demonstrates major qualitative differences with either TDHF or GCM previous approaches.