Symmetry energy dependence of light fragment production in heavy-ion collisions

¹ Fac. of Physics, University of Munich, D-85748 Garching, Germany
² Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063, USA
³ INFN-Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, I-95123, Catania, Italy

^† deceased

Published online: 24 April 2015

Abstract

The pre-equilibrium light cluster emission in low to intermediate energy heavy ion collisions is a way to obtain information about the density and momentum dependence of the nuclear symmetry potential, i.e. about the stiffness of the symmetry energy and the neutron-proton effective mass splitting. We study the n/p and t/³He ratios as a function of the energy of the emitted particles and find that these allow to disentangle these two aspects of the symmetry energy. The t/³He ratios are found to carry similar information as the n/p ratios, making this a promising option for experimental investigations. More n-rich systems enhance the sensitivity to the symmetry energy, while double ratios between n-rich and n-poor systems tend to reduce it.