V. Lips et al., EVIDENCE FOR SIMULTANEOUS BREAKUP IN REACTIONS WITH RELATIVISTIC ALPHA-PROJECTILES, Physics letters. Section B, 338(2-3), 1994, pp. 141-146
The relative-angle distributions of IMFs, studied for the system alpha
+Au-197 at 3.6 GeV/nucleon, show a strong suppression of small relativ
e angles. By multi-body Coulomb trajectory calculations it is shown th
at the magnitude of this effect is very sensitive to the time scale of
the IMF emission. The experimental angular distributions are well des
cribed assuming a fast breakup of the system with times less than 100
fm/c between IMF emissions.