In medium binding energies and Mott points for $d$, $t$, $^3$He and $alpha$ clusters in low density nuclear matter have been determined at specific combinations of temperature and density in low density nuclear matter produced in collisions of 47$A$ MeV $^{40}$Ar and $^{64}$Zn projectiles with $^{112}$Sn and $^{124}$Sn target nuclei. The experimentally derived values of the in medium modified binding energies are in good agreement with recent theoretical predictions based upon the implementation of Pauli blocking effects in a quantum statistical approach.
We present, for the first time, simultaneous determination of shear viscosity ($eta$) and entropy density ($s$) and thus, $eta/s$ for equilibrated nuclear systems from $A$ $sim$ 30 to $A$ $sim$ 208 at different temperatures. At finite temperature, $eta$ is estimated by utilizing the $gamma$ decay of the isovector giant dipole resonance populated via fusion evaporation reaction, while $s$ is evaluated from the nuclear level density parameter (${a}$) and nuclear temperature ($T$), determined precisely by the simultaneous measurements of the evaporated neutron energy spectra and the compound nuclear angular momenta. The transport parameter $eta$ and the thermodynamic parameter $s$ both increase with temperature resulting in a mild decrease of $eta$/$s$ with temperature. The extracted $eta$/$s$ is also found to be independent of the neutron-proton asymmetry at a given temperature. Interestingly, the measured $eta$/$s$ values are comparable to that of the high-temperature quark-gluon plasma, pointing towards the fact that strong fluidity may be the universal feature of the strong interaction of many-body quantum systems.
Production cross sections of K$^+$ and K$^-$ mesons have been measured in C+C collisions at beam energies per nucleon below and near the nucleon-nucleon threshold. At a given beam energy, the spectral slopes of the K$^-$ mesons are significantly steeper than the ones of the K$^+$ mesons. The excitation functions for K$^+$ and K$^-$ mesons nearly coincide when correcting for the threshold energy. In contrast, the K$^+$ yield exceeds the K$^-$ yield by a factor of about 100 in proton-proton collisions at beam energies near the respective nucleon-nucleon thresholds.
Knowledge on nuclear cluster physics has increased considerably as nuclear clustering remains one of the most fruitful domains of nuclear physics, facing some of the greatest challenges and opportunities in the years ahead. The occurrence of exotic shapes in light N=Z alpha-like nuclei and the evolution of clustering from stability to the drip-lines are being investigated more and more accurately both theoretically and experimentally. Experimental progresses in understanding these questions were recently examined and will be further revisited in this introductory talk: clustering aspects are, in particular, discussed for light exotic nuclei with a large neutron excess such as neutron-rich Oxygen isotopes with their complete spectrocopy.
We study nuclear stopping in central collisions for heavy-ion induced reactions in the Fermi energy domain, between $15$ and $100$ A,textrm{MeV}. Using the large dataset of exclusive measurements provided by the $4pi$ array emph{INDRA}, we determine the relative degree of stopping as a function of system mass and bombarding energy. We show that the stopping can be directly related to the transport properties in the nuclear medium. By looking specifically at free nucleons (here protons), we present for the first time a comprehensive body of experimental results concerning the mean free path, the nucleon-nucleon cross-section and in-medium effects in nuclear matter. It is shown that the mean free path exhibits a maximum at $lambda_{NN}=9.5 pm 2$ textrm{fm}, around $E_{inc}=35-40$ A,textrm{MeV} incident energy and decreases toward an asymptotic value $lambda_{NN}= 4.5 pm 1$ textrm{fm} at $E_{inc} = 100$ A,textrm{MeV}. After accounting for Pauli blocking of elastic nucleon-nucleon collisions, it is shown that the effective in-medium emph{NN} cross section is further reduced compared to the free value in this energy range. Therefore, in-medium effects cannot be neglected in the Fermi energy range. These results bring new fundamental inputs for microscopic descriptions of nuclear reactions in the Fermi energy domain.
The FRS-ESR facility at GSI provides unique conditions for precision measurements of large areas on the nuclear mass surface in a single experiment. Values for masses of 604 neutron-deficient nuclides (30<=Z<=92) were obtained with a typical uncertainty of 30 microunits. The masses of 114 nuclides were determined for the first time. The odd-even staggering (OES) of nuclear masses was systematically investigated for isotopic chains between the proton shell closures at Z=50 and Z=82. The results were compared with predictions of modern nuclear models. The comparison revealed that the measured trend of OES is not reproduced by the theories fitted to masses only. The spectral pairing gaps extracted from models adjusted to both masses, and density related observables of nuclei agree better with the experimental data.