Eur. Phys. J. A (2022) 58: 7
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-022-00662-5

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Exploring isospin effects in nuclear fragmentation at 600 MeV/nucleon

Department of Physics, Panjab University, 160014, Chandigarh, India

^b sakshigautam@pu.ac.in

Received: 15 April 2021
Accepted: 3 January 2022
Published online: 19 January 2022

Abstract

Nuclear fragmentation of Sn, La Sn collisions at 600 MeV/nucleon is studied using Isospin-dependent Quantum Molecular Dynamics (IQMD) model to get insights about the influence of isospin on the reaction dynamics. Charges of heaviest fragment and multiplicity of IMFs as a function of Z are shown and these trends are not sensitive to N/Z of the system. However, a nice qualitative agreement with experimental measurement is noted. Further, yield, transverse flow and nuclear stopping of various fragments are investigated to see if these observables could respond to isotopic composition of the colliding partners or not. Our findings reveal that fragment yields and transverse flows are influenced by total colliding mass and not by isotopic ratio (N/Z) of the reaction at 600 MeV/nucleon. On the other hand, stopping power of intermediate mass fragments is sensitive to N/Z ratio of reacting systems. Moreover, elliptic flow of high-p neutrons is obtained to be sensitive to nuclear symmetry energy. Further, the relative senstivity of nuclear stopping variables to equation of state, nuclear symmetry energy and nucleon-nucleon cross-section is studied at 100 and 600 MeV/nucleon. It is observed that all stopping variables show weak senstivity to symmetry energy compared to equation of state and isospin effects via nucleon-nucleon cross-section. We observed different nuclear stopping of IMFs for La Sn and Sn Sn collisions reflecting it to be a sensitive observable towards N/Z ratio of colliding system at high beam energies. This different behaviour of thermalisation in Sn, La Sn reactions is owed to different Coulomb interactions in the two colliding pairs.