[en] The discovery of the elements 107, 108, and 109 in a region of dominating shell stabilization is the most important step on the way to the superheavy nuclei in recent years. These experiments leading to the presently upper end of the periodic table were possible with the velocity filter SHIP to separate the heavy nuclei produced in complete fusion reactions of heavy ions. The identification of the unknown nuclei was established by α-α mother-daughter correlation of the nuclei decaying after the implantation into position sensitive surface-barrier detectors. With this method it is possible to identify even single nuclei of unknown isotopes unambiguously. The limits of sensitivity are production cross-sections of a few picobarns and about 2 μs of nuclear lifetime. With this method the elements 107, 108, and 109 were observed for the first time by their α-decay and identified unambiguously. For element 107 the isotopes with masses 261 and 262, for the element 108 the isotopes with masses 264 and 265, and for element 109 the isotope with mass 266 were found. The halflives range from 0.1 ms to 0.1 s. The highly fissile transactinide nuclei were produced in cold fusion of heavy ions using ^207,208Pb and ²⁰⁹Bi targets, respectively, and ⁵⁰Ti, ⁵⁴Cr, or ⁵⁸Fe beams. The evaluation of the excitation functions for the production of very heavy evaporation residues shows a strong decrease above 25 MeV excitation energy caused by a destruction of the groundstate shell effects at high excitation energies. The strong competition of barrier transmission and survival probability results in rather narrow excitation functions and small production cross sections. The maximum cross section is observed close to the Coulomb barrier and corresponding to projectile energies near 5 MeV/u. (orig.)

[en] In order to develop a relativistic transport model of heavy-ion collisions it is important to find a consistent framework for describing both aspects of the nuclear interaction, the longe-range part mediated by the mean-field and the short-range part for which 'hard' two-body collisions are responsible. In this paper, we are concerned with the long-range part of the interaction which enters the relativistic Vlasov equation. (orig./HSI)