Comparison of radial flow effects on partitions of multifragmenting sources formed in symmetric and asymmetric central collisions

Abstract

The role of collective radial expansion in determining multifragmentation partition properties has previously been explored by comparing different-sized sources of the same excitation energy per nucleon formed by very different reaction mechanisms: excited quasi-projectiles from semi-peripheral Au+Au collisions and quasi-fused sources from central Xe+Sn collisions. New data has been obtained with INDRA on 181Ta+66Zn collisions in order to allow comparison of Xe+Sn data with quasi-fused systems having the same mass, charge and excitation energy per nucleon formed in mass-asymmetric reactions, for which a smaller initial compression is expected. Preliminary results confirm that, ceteris paribus, smaller radial flow leads to less fragments with more asymmetric partitions.