Aligned breakup of heavy nuclear systems as a new type of deep inelastic collisions at small impact parameters

An interesting process of violent reseparation of a heavy nuclear system into three or four fragments of comparable size was recently observed in {sup 197}Au+{sup 197}Au collisions at 15 MeV/nucleon. Combined analysis of the binary deep inelastic events and the ternary and quaternary breakup events demonstrates that the newly observed ternary and quaternary reactions belong to the same wide class of deep inelastic collisions as the conventional (binary) damped reactions. It is shown that the ternary and quaternary breakup reactions occur at extremely inelastic collisions corresponding to small impact parameters, while more peripheral collisions lead to well-known binary deep inelastic reactions.