We investigate the influence of couplings among continuum states in collisions of weakly bound nuclei. For this purpose, we compare cross sections for complete fusion, breakup and elastic scattering evaluated by continuum discretized coupled channel (CDCC) calculations, including and not including these couplings. In our study, we discuss this influence in terms of the polarization potentials that reproduce the elastic wave function of the coupled coupled channel method in single channel calculations. We find that the inclusion of couplings among the continuum states renders the real part of the polarization potential more repulsive, whereas it leads to weaker apsorption to the breakup channel. We show that the non-inclusion of continuum-continuum couplings in CDCC calculations may not lead to qualitative and quantitative wrong conclusions.
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