Fermionic Molecular Dynamics Multifragmentation in heavyion collisions and in excited nucl.pdfVIP

FERMIONIC MOLECULAR DYNAMICS: MULTIFRAGMENTATION IN HEAVY–ION 7 9 9 COLLISIONS AND IN EXCITED NUCLEI 1 r a M H. Feldmeier∗ and J. Schnack† 7 1 1 Gesellschaft f¨ur Schwerionenforschung mbH, v 5 Postfach 110 552, D-64220 Darmstadt 3 0 3 0 7 9 / 1 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY h t - l c How multifragmentation happens in heavy ion collisions is still a matter of debate. u n Explanations reach from nucleation over self organization, spinodal decomposition : v i to cold break–up and survival of initial correlations. For an overview see ref. [1]. A X r key question is the time scale of the reaction. Slow processes like nucleation or self a organization are hindered if the expansion of the whole system is too fast. Another issue is the relaxation time for thermal and chemical equilibrium which is important when statistical models are used to explain multifragmentation [2, 3, 4, 5]. If one considers the decay of excited spectator matter which has not been com- pressed, the expansion preceding the fragmentation might be slow enough to allow for global equilibration. However, below excitations energies of about 6 MeV per nucleon an equilibrated nucleus will most likely cool down by evaporating nucleons but not by breaking into many intermediate mass fragments (IMF, Z ≥ 3). The reason is that the barrier for multifragmentation is too high and the nucleus has ∗email: h.feldmeier@gsi.de, WWW: http://www.gsi.de/∼feldm †email: j.schnack@gsi.de, WWW: http://www.gsi.de/∼schnack 1 cooled already by evaporation before it fragments into pieces. In or