CLUSTERING RECOGNITION MODEL FOR INTERMEDIATE-ENERGY HEAVY-ION REACTIONS

A clustering model which allows the recognition of mass fragments from dynamical simulations has been developed. Studying the evolution of a microscopic computation based on the nuclear Boltzman equation, a sui table time is chosen to define bound clusters. At this stopping time t he cluster cores for each member of the distribution are defined as a function of the overall density. Then an iterative routine is applied to estimate the coalescence of the surrounding nucleons. Once the frag ment formation has been established, a statistical decay code is used to generate the final fragment distributions. Applications are shown t o the reactions Xe-129 + Cu-nat at 50 MeV/nucleon and La-139 on Al-27 and Cu-nat at 45 MeV/nucleon. A general improvement in cluster identif ication is found over approaches where a standard cluster separation a lgorithm has been used.