Multifragmentation at the balance energy of mass asymmetric colliding nuclei

TL;DR

This study investigates how mass asymmetry influences nuclear fragmentation at the balance energy using quantum molecular dynamics, revealing significant effects on fragment multiplicity and a power-law dependence on system mass.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of mass asymmetry effects on fragmentation at balance energy across various system masses using quantum molecular dynamics.

Findings

Mass asymmetry significantly affects fragment multiplicity.

The dependence on mass asymmetry increases with system mass.

A power-law relation exists for fragment multiplicities at large asymmetries.

Abstract

Using the quantum molecular dynamics model, we study the role of mass asymmetry of colliding nuclei on the fragmentation at the balance energy and on its mass dependence. The study is done by keeping the total mass of the system fixed as 40, 80, 160, and 240 and by varying the mass asymmetry of the ($\eta$ = $\frac{A_{T}-A_{P}}{A_{T}+A_{P}}$; where $A_{T}$ and $A_{P}$ are the masses of the target and projectile, respectively) reaction from 0.1 to 0.7. Our results clearly indicate a sizeable effect of the mass asymmetry on the multiplicity of various fragments. The mass asymmetry dependence of various fragments is found to increase with increase in total system mass (except for heavy mass fragments). Similar to symmetric reactions, a power law system mass dependence of various fragment multiplicities is also found to exit for large asymmetries.