EIGENMOMENTS FOR MULTIFRAGMENTATION

Linear rate equations are used to describe the cascading decay of an i nitial heavy cluster into fragments. Using a procedure inspired by the similar, but continuous case of jet fragmentation in QCD, this discre tized process may be analyzed into eigenmodes, corresponding to moment s of the distribution of multiplicities. The orders of these moments a re usually noninteger numbers. The resulting analysis can be made time independent and is applicable to various phenomenological multifragme ntation processes, in which case it leads to new approximate finite-si ze scaling relations for the spectrum of fragments.