Experimental Investigations of Clustering in Low Density Nuclear Matter

The formation of clusters in low density matter formed in near Fermi energy heavy ion collisions has been investigated using the NIMROD multi‐detector at Texas A&M University. Emphasis is on elucidation of the low density equation of state. Temperature and density dependent symmetry free energies derived from isoscaling analyses of the yields of nuclei with A≤4 are far above those obtained in common effective interaction calculations, reflecting the cluster formation. A possible extensionof the experimental techniques to investigations of nuclear Bose condensates is also discussed.