Critical behavior of the isotope yield distributions in the Multifragmentation Regime of Heavy Ion Reactions


Abstract in English

Isotope yields have been analyzed within the framework of a Modified Fisher Model to study the power law yield distribution of isotopes in the multifragmentation regime. Using the ratio of the mass dependent symmetry energy coefficient relative to the temperature, $a_{sym}/T$, extracted in previous work and that of the pairing term, $a_{p}/T$, extracted from this work, and assuming that both reflect secondary decay processes, the experimentally observed isotope yields have been corrected for these effects. For a given I = N - Z value, the corrected yields of isotopes relative to the yield of $^{12}C$ show a power law distribution, $Y(N,Z)/Y(^{12}C) sim A^{-tau}$, in the mass range of $1 le A le 30$ and the distributions are almost identical for the different reactions studied. The observed power law distributions change systematically when I of the isotopes changes and the extracted $tau$ value decreases from 3.9 to 1.0 as I increases from -1 to 3. These observations are well reproduced by a simple de-excitation model, which the power law distribution of the primary isotopes is determined to $tau^{prim} = 2.4 pm 0.2$, suggesting that the disassembling system at the time of the fragment formation is indeed at or very near the critical point.

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