Signatures of critical phenomena in rare atom clusters

Abstract

We study the occurrence of a critical behaviour related to a liquid-gas phase transition in an atomic cluster. In particular, we analyse some experimental possibilities to investigate the role of finite size effects on the phase behaviour. In mass distributions, conditional moments, as well as scaled factorial moments of fragment mass distributions we find evidence for the presence of critical behaviour. It can be connected, by the use of Fisher's droplet model and Campi analysis, to a liquid-gas phase transition.