Multifragmentation and the liquid-gas phase transition: an experimental overview

Abstract

Two roads are presently being followed in order to establish the existence of a liquid-gas phase transition in finite nuclear systems from nuclear reactions at high energy. The clean experiment of observing the thermodynamic properties of a finite number of nucleons in a container is presently only possible with the computer. Performed with advanced nuclear transport models, it has revealed the first-order character of the transition and allowed the extraction of the pertinent thermodynamic parameters. The validity of the applied theory is being confirmed by comparing its predictions for heavy-ion reactions with exclusive experiments. The second approach is experimentally more direct. Signals of the transition are searched for by analysing reaction data within the framework of thermodynamics of small systems. A variety of potential signals has been investigated and found to be qualitatively consistent with the expectations for the phase transition. Many of them are well reproduced with percolation models which places the nuclear fragmentation into the more general context of partitioning phenomena in finite systems. A wealth of new data on this subject has been obtained in recent experiments, some of them with a new generation of multi-detector devices aiming at higher resolutions, isotopic identification of the fragments, and the coincident detection of neutrons. Isotopic effects in multifragmentation were addressed quite intensively, with particular attention being given to their relation to the symmetry energy and its dependence on density.

10 pages, 7 figures, Contribution to Proceedings of INPC2004, Goeteborg, Sweden, June 27 - July 2, 2004

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Isospin-dependent clusterization of Neutron-Star Matter
• Equation of state of hadron resonance gas and the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter
• Cluster formation in compact stars: relativistic versus Skyrme models
• Constraining the Symmetry Term in the Nuclear Equation of State at Sub-Saturation Densities and Finite Temperatures
• Cluster formation in asymmetric nuclear matter: semi-classical and quantal approaches
• Relevance of equilibrium in multifragmentation
• Experimental study of fragmentation products in the reactions 112Sn + 112Sn and 124Sn + 124Sn at 1 AGeV
• Spinodal instabilities of asymmetric nuclear matter within the Brueckner--Hartree--Fock approach
• Isotopic effects in multifragmentation and the nuclear equation of state
• Exact solution of bond percolation on small arbitrary graphs
• An exact formula for percolation on higher-order cycles
• Spinodal instabilities of spin polarized asymmetric nuclear matter
• Light Nuclei within Nuclear Matter