Fragment emission and critical behavior in light and heavy charged systems *

Abstract

Abstract We study the emission of fragments in central collisions of light and heavily charged systems of 40Ar+45Sc and 84Kr+197Au, respectively, using the Quantum Molecular Dynamics (QMD) model as the primary model. The fragments are identified using an energy based clusterization algorithm, i.e., the Simulated Annealing Clusterization Algorithm (SACA). The charge distributions of intermediate mass fragments [3≤ ≤12] are fitted with power-law ( ) and exponential ( ) fits in order to extract the parameters τ and whose minimum values are also sometimes linked with the onset of fragmentation or the critical point for a liquid-gas phase transition. Other parameters such as the normalized second moment , , average size of the second largest cluster , phase separation parameter ( ), bimodal parameter (P), information entropy (H), and Zipf's law are also analyzed to find the exact energy of the onset of fragmentation. Our detailed analysis predicts that an energy point exists between 20-23.1 MeV/nucleon, which is very close to the experimentally observed value of 23.9 MeV/nucleon for the 40Ar+45Sc reaction. We also find that the critical energy deduced using Zipf's law is higher than those predicted from other critical exponents. Moreover, no minimum is found for τ values of the highly charged system of 84Kr+197Au, in agreement with experimental findings and various theoretical calculations. We observe that the QMD + SACA model calculations are in agreement with the experimental observations. This agreement supports our results regarding the energy point of the liquid-gas phase transition and the onset of fragmentation.