IMPACT-PARAMETER DEPENDENCE OF TERNARY AND QUATERNARY RESEPARATION OF HEAVY COLLIDING SYSTEMS

Recently, we reported on the observation of a new reaction mechanism of fast collinear breakup of the 197 Au + 197 Au system into three and four fragments of comparable size. Here we present results of an additional analysis that shows that these ternary and quaternary breakup reactions occur at extremely deep-inelastic collisions corresponding to small values of the impact parameter, while more peripheral collisions lead to well known binary deep-inelastic reactions.