Correlation between excitation energy and nucleonic phase space in the projectile fragmentation process - art. no. 024609

Using the former results and analyzing the quantitative discrepancies betwe en the experimental data and present theories concerning the projectile fra gmentation process we propose an improvement on Goldhaber formula. We want therefore to sustain the idea that the projectile fragmentation process is not as fast as it was supposed to be from the very beginning. The process w ould be governed by the distribution of nucleon momenta in the projectile s hortly after the collision occurred. We used in our analysis protons from t he He-4 fragmentation when colliding Li-7 target at 4.5 GeV/c per nucleon i ncident momentum, protons detected by the 2 m streamer chamber from SKM 200 spectrometer as well as Ar-40 (E-inc = 213 MeV/nucleon)+ C-12 data used in previous papers. Our purpose was to demonstrate that in order to proceed i n analyzing the projectile fragmentation process at intermediate and high e nergies one has to take into account the dependence of oo on the apparent t emperature of projectile nucleus soon after the collision took place. The g eneralized Bertsch correction for all light up to medium projectile nuclei and fragments is used and the total number of spatial correlations between identical nucleons (in the same state of spin and isospin) having anticorre lated momenta is evaluated. Considering all those criteria as well as the p rojectile excitation hypothesis, apparent temperature values reasonably clo se to the separation energies of the considered fragments per number of fra gments were found. [S0556-2813(99)01408-9].