Isotopic dependence of the nuclear caloric curve

The A/Z dependence of projectile fragmentation at relativistic energies has been studied with the ALADIN forward spectrometer at SIS. A stable beam of (124)Sn and radioactive beams of (124)La and (107)Sn at 600 MeV per nucleon have been used in order to explore a wide range of isotopic compositions. Chemical freeze-out temperatures are found to be nearly invariant with respect to the A/Z of the produced spectator sources, consistent with predictions for expanded systems. Small Coulomb effects (DeltaT approximately 0.6 MeV) appear for residue production near the onset of multifragmentation.

Isotopic scaling and the symmetry energy in spectator fragmentation

Isotopic effects in the fragmentation of excited target residues following collisions of 12C on (112,124)Sn at incident energies of 300 and 600 MeV per nucleon were studied with the INDRA 4pi detector. The measured yield ratios for light particles and fragments with atomic number Z < or = 5 obey the exponential law of isotopic scaling. The deduced scaling parameters decrease strongly with increasing centrality to values smaller than 50% of those obtained for the peripheral event groups. Symmetry-term coefficients, deduced from these data within the statistical description of isotopic scaling, are near gamma = 25 MeV for peripheral and gamma < 15 MeV for central collisions.

Partitioning composite finite systems

We compare different analytical and numerical methods for studying the partitions of a finite system into fragments. We propose a numerical method of exploring the partition space by generating the Markov chains of partitions based on the Metropolis algorithm. The advantages of the method for the problems where partitions are sampled with nontrivial weights are demonstrated.