Fusion cross sections at deep subbarrier energies

A recent publication reports that heavy-ion fusion cross sections at extreme subbarrier energies show a continuous change of their logarithmic slope with decreasing energy, resulting in a much steeper excitation function compared with theoretical predictions. We show that the energy dependence of this slope is partly due to the asymmetric shape of the Coulomb barrier, that is its deviation from a harmonic shape. We also point out that the large low-energy slope is consistent with the surprisingly large surface diffusenesses required to fit recent high-precision fusion data.