Breakup of weakly bound 17F well above the Coulomb barrier

The breakup of radioactive 17F into a proton and 16O was measured by bombarding 208Pb with 170 MeV 17F. The angular correlations of the fragments and the energy distributions of the protons suggest that the dominant breakup mechanism is a direct process in which a proton is excited into the low energy continuum above the breakup threshold. The breakup cross section measured near the grazing angle is 6.6±0.7 mb/sr for analysis with postacceleration considered and 3.9±0.4 mb/sr without postacceleration. This cross section is small compared to the fusion cross section at energies near the Coulomb barrier, so the breakup can have little influence on the fusion process.