Interpreting multiplicity-gated fragment distributions from heavy-ion collisions

In recent years, multifragmentation of nuclear systems has been extensively studied, and many efforts have been made to clarify the underlying physics. However, no clear consensus exists on the mechanism for multifragmentation. Is the emission of intermediate mass fragments (IMF: 3 {le} Z {le} 20) a dynamical process (brought on by the occurrence of instabilities of one form or another) or a statistical process (i.e. the decay probabilities are proportional to a suitably defined exit channel phase space)? Historically the charge (mass) distribution has played and still plays a very important role in characterizing multifragmentation. Since this subject`s inception, the near power-law shape of the charge and mass distributions was considered an indication of criticality for the hot nuclear fluid produced in light ion and heavy ion collisions. Here, the authors have studied different aspects of the charge distributions. The implications of the experimental evidence presented here are potentially far reaching. On the one hand, the thermal features observed in the n-fragment emission probabilities for the {sup 36}Ar + {sup 197}Au reaction extend consistently to the charge distributions and strengthen the hypothesis of the important role of phase space in describing multifragmentation. On the other hand, they have investigated charge correlation functions of multi-fragment decays to search for the enhanced production of nearly equal-sized fragments predicted in several theoretical works.