Spectator matter fragmentation in Au+Au reactions: Phase space analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how spectator matter fragments in Au+Au reactions at high energy, emphasizing phase space clustering and comparing algorithms, revealing the importance of binding energy criteria and limitations of the MST method.

Contribution

It introduces a phase space analysis using SACA for spectator fragmentation and compares it with MST, highlighting the significance of binding energy in fragment recognition.

Findings

SACA effectively identifies fragments in phase space.

MST underestimates intermediate mass fragment multiplicity.

Binding energy criterion is crucial for accurate fragment recognition.

Abstract

Clusterization in phase space has been analyzed for peripheral Au+Au reactions at 1000 AMeV using simulated annealing clusterization algorithm (SACA). We investigate how these fragments are correlated in phase space and compare our model calculations with minimum spanning tree (MST) method. Our theoretical study highlights the importance of binding energy criterion in recognizing the fragment structure. MST method however, fails to break-up the spectator matter effectively and thus under-estimates the multiplicity of intermediate mass fragments (IMFs).