Nonlocal interactions are an intrinsically quantum phenomenon. In this work we point out that, in the context of heavy ions, such interactions can be studied through the refractive elastic scattering of these systems at intermediate energies. We show that most of the observed energy dependence of the local equivalent bare potential arises from the exchange nonlocality. The nonlocality parameter extracted from the data was found to be very close to the one obtained from folding models. The effective mass of the colliding, heavy-ion, system was found to be close to the nucleon effective mass in nuclear matter. [S0031-9007(97)02958-X] PACS numbers: 25.70. Bc, 21.30.Fe, 21.65. + f, Of fundamental importance in nuclear physics are the effects arising from the Fermi nature of the nucleons. When calculating interaction potentials between nuclei, these effects translate into a nonlocality. This Pauli nonlocality has been discussed in the context of the nucleon-nucleus scattering [1,2]. A fully microscopic calculation of the nucleus-nucleus interaction is quite complicated and one relies here on procedures such as the resonating-group method [3]. Other methods rely on relating the nucleusnucleus nonlocality to that of the nucleon-nucleus one using folding procedure [4]. However, the prediction of Jackson and Johnson [4], namely, the nonlocality range in the nucleus-nucleus systems, is smaller than that in the nucleon-nucleus one by about the inverse of the reduced mass in the former, was never really subjected to tests. In this Letter we supply such a test through a careful analysis of the elastic scattering of the systems 12 C 1 12 C and 16 O 1 12 C at intermediate energies.Before we set the stage for our analysis of exchange effects in the ion-ion interaction, we first say a few words about this interaction. The effective, one-body interaction that determines the elastic scattering between two nuclei can be written in a schematic way asThe first term, V bare ͑r, r 0 ͒, is usually called the bare interaction. It represents the ground state expectation value of the interaction operator, which contains as basic input the average effective nucleon-nucleon force (G matrix). The nonlocality here is solely due to the Pauli exclusion principle and in what follows we refer to it as the Pauli nonlocality. The second term contains the contribution arising from virtual transitions to intermediate states i (inelastic channels, transfer channels, etc). The corresponding nonlocality arises almost entirely from the polarizations that ensue in the heavy-ion system owing to the propagation in the intermediate channels. This is exemplified by the channel Green's function G ͑1͒ i ͑r, r 0 ; E͒, which contains an explicit energy dependence. This latter contribution is called the Feshbach term and thus we refer to its nonlocality as the Feshbach nonlocality. When confronting theory with experiment one usually relies on a one-body optical model with a local potential. This brings into light immediately the issue of extracting from Eq. (1) a l...