Experimental observables on nuclear liquid gas phase transition.pdf

a r X i v : n u c l - e x / 0 6 1 0 0 1 4 v 1 7 O c t 2 0 0 6 Experimental observables on nuclear liquid gas phase transition § Y. G. Ma Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China E-mail: ygma@sinap.ac.cn Abstract. Progress on nuclear liquid gas phase transition (LGPT) or critical behavior has been simply reviewed and some signals of LGPT in heavy ion collisions, especially in NIMROD data, are focused. These signals include the power-law charge distribution, the largest fluctuation of the fragment observables, the nuclear Zipf law, caloric curve and critical exponent analysis etc. 1. Introduction Phase transition and critical phenomenon are extensively debatable subjects in the natural sciences. Recently, the same concept was introduced into the astronomical objects [1] as well as the microscopic systems, such as in atomic cluster [2] and nuclei [3]. Nucleus is a finite-size droplet-like quantum system in the ground state, it may experience the liquid-gas phase transition or critical behavior when the nucleus is heated. Till date, various experimental evidences have been accumulated to corroborate the nuclear liquid gas phase transition or critical behavior. For instance, violent heavy-ion collisions break the nuclei into several intermediate mass fragments (IMF) instantaneously [4, 5, 6, 7], which might be viewed as a critical phenomenon as observed in fluid, atomic and other systems. The sudden opening of the nuclear multifragmentation and vaporization [8] channels can be interpreted as the signature of the boundaries of phase mixture. In addition, temperature plateau of the nuclear caloric curve [9] in a certain excitation energy range gives a possible indication of phase transition [10, 11, 12, 13]. On the other hand, the extraction of critical exponents in the charge or mass distribution of the multifragmentation system [14] points to the continuous phase transition. More recently, the negative microcanonical heat capacity wa