Bimodality and Latent Heat of Gold Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper investigates the coexistence of evaporation and multifragmentation in hot quasi-projectile sources from peripheral collisions, analyzing correlations to identify phase transition signatures and estimate latent heat.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed correlation analysis between fragment size and excitation energy to characterize phase transition boundaries and latent heat in nuclear matter.

Findings

Identification of bimodality in fragment distributions.

Estimation of latent heat from correlation analysis.

Determination of spinodal and coexistence zone boundaries.

Abstract

Peripheral collisions give access to a set of events where hot quasi-projectile (QP) sources are produced exploring a large range of excitation energy. In this range evaporation and multifragmentation are both observed for a similar charge/size of the sources. In this work, this experimental fact will be described in terms of coexistence of two classes of events in the first order phase transition formalism. For this, a detailed study of the experimental correlation between the size/charge of the biggest cluster/fragment (Z1) and the excitation energy (E*) is made. Making the parallel with the same correlation derived from the canonical ensemble description, a first value of the latent heat and boundaries of spinodal and coexistence zone are extracted.