Sequential and simultaneous emission of fragments from p+Al collisions

TL;DR

This study measures the energy and angular distributions of various fragments produced in proton-aluminum collisions at different energies, revealing two emission mechanisms: evaporation and multifragmentation.

Contribution

It introduces a combined analysis of isotropic evaporation and anisotropic multifragmentation contributions to fragment emission in proton-nucleus collisions.

Findings

Good description of fragment spectra and angular distributions achieved

Identification of two emission mechanisms: evaporation and multifragmentation

Critical excitation energy per nucleon as a key parameter

Abstract

The energy and angular dependencies of double differential cross sections d^2sigma/dOmegadE were measured for p,d,t,^{3,4,6}He,^{6,7,8}Li,{7,9,10}Be, and ^{10,11,12}B produced in collisions of 1.2, 1.9, and 2.5 GeV protons with an Al target. The spectra and angular distributions of Li, Be, and B isotopes indicate a presence of two contributions: an isotropic, low energy one which is attributed to the evaporation of particles from excited remnants of the intranuclear cascade, and an anisotropic part which is interpreted to be due to multifragmentation of the remnants. It was found that such a hypothesis leads to very good description of spectra and angular distributions of all intermediate mass fragments (^6He-^{12}B) using the critical value of the excitation energy per nucleon as a single parameter, varying slowly with the beam energy.