Peripheral Reaction Mechanisms in Intermediate Energy Heavy-Ion Reactions

At beam energies up to E/A = 20 MeV deep-inelastic reactions are the dominant reaction mechanism for heavy-ion peripheral collisions. These reactions are characterized by broadening of the mass and charge distributions with increasing energy loss or excitation energy and by orbiting in the deflection functions. Excitation energy is produced through the relative momentum of exchanged nucleons. The deep-inelastic reaction mechanism is a very efficient way to produce hot nuclei at relatively low beam energies.