To overcome this barrier, nuclei have to collide at high velocities, so their kinetic energies drive them close enough for the strong interaction to take place and bind them together.
In practice, temperatures needed to overcome the Coulomb barrier turned out to be smaller than expected due to quantum mechanical tunnelling, as established by Gamow.
The consideration of barrier-penetration through tunnelling and the speed distribution gives rise to a limited range of conditions where fusion can take place, known as the Gamow window.
[1][2] There is keen interest in the mechanics and parameters of nuclear fusion, including methods of modeling the Coulomb barrier for scientific and educational purposes.
The microscopic range of the strong interaction, on the order of one femtometre, makes it challenging to model and no classical examples exist on the human scale.