Bimodality - a Sign of Critical Behavior in Nuclear Reactions

Abstract

The recently discovered coexistence of multifragmentation and residue production for the same total transverse energy of light charged particles can be well reproduced in numerical simulations of the heavy ion reactions. A detailed analysis shows that fluctuations (introduced by elementary nucleon-nucleon collisions) determine which of the exit states is realized. Thus we observe for the first time nonlinear dynamics in heavy ion reactions. Also the scaling of the coexistence region with beam energy is well reproduced in these results from the QMD simulation program.

references update, slightly shortend, final version to be published in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (2)

• Bimodality: a possible experimental signature of the liquid-gas phase transition of nuclear matter
• Transition from participant to spectator fragmentation in Au+Au reaction between 60 AMeV and 150 AMeV

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Effect of the symmetry energy on nuclear stopping and its relation to the production of light charged fragments
• Liquid-Gas phase transition in nuclei
• Bimodal behavior of the heaviest fragment distribution in projectile fragmentation
• Multiplicity Derivative: A new signature of first order phase transition in intermediate energy heavy ion collision
• Bimodality - a general feature of heavy ion reactions
• Signals of bimodality in the fragmentation of Au quasi-projectiles
• Bimodality and Coulomb effects with a canonical thermodynamic model
• Investigation of the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition in the static AMD