Heating nuclei with high-energy antiprotons

Abstract

The distributions of thermal energy generated in different target nuclei by means of the annihilation of antiprotons onto their surfaces have been investigated. The results confirm that fairly hot nuclei are produced in this approach, as predicted by Intra-Nuclear Cascade calculations. Although the transition towards multifragmentation as the primary decay channel is not observed, these data should allow to pin down the decay patterns of hot nuclei with little excitation of their collective degrees of freedom. In turn this may shed new light on the mechanisms responsible for some events associated with high fragment multiplicities as observed in heavy-ion collisions.