Signals of Bose Einstein condensation and Fermi quenching in the decay of hot nuclear systems

Abstract

We report on first experimental observations of nuclear fermionic and bosonic components displaying different behaviours in the decay of hot Ca projectile-like sources produced in mid-peripheral collisions at sub-Fermi energies. The experimental setup, constituted by the coupling of the INDRA 4π detector array to the forward angle VAMOS magnetic spectrometer, allowed to reconstruct the mass, charge and excitation energy of the decaying hot projectile-like sources. By means of quantum-fluctuation analysis techniques, temperatures and local partial densities of bosons and fermions could be correlated to the excitation energy of the reconstructed system. The results are consistent with the production of dilute mixed systems of bosons and fermions, where bosons experience higher phase-space and energy density as compared to the surrounding fermionic gas. Our findings recall phenomena observed in the study of Bose condensates and Fermi gases in atomic traps despite the different scales.

Keywords

• Bose–Einstein condensation
• Heavy ion collisions
• Quantum-fluctuations method