Exclusive studies of angular distributions in GeV hadron-induced reactions with197Au

Exclusive studies of angular distributions for intermediate-mass fragments (IMFs) produced in GeV hadron-induced reactions have been performed with the Indiana Silicon Sphere (ISiS) 4[pi] detector array. Special emphasis has been given to understanding the origin of sideways peaking, which becomes prominent in the angular distributions for beam momenta above about 10 GeV/c. Both the magnitude of the effect and the peak angle increase as a function of fragment multiplicity and charge. When gated on IMF kinetic energy, the angular distributions evolve from forward-peaked to near isotropy as the fragment kinetic energy decreases. Fragment-fragment angular-correlation analyses show no obvious evidence for a dynamic mechanism that might signal shock wave effects or the breakup of exotic geometric shapes such as bubbles or toroids. Moving-source and intranuclear cascade simulations suggest that the observed sideways peaking is of kinematic origin, arising from significant transverse momentum imparted to the heavy recoil nucleus during the fast cascade stage of the collision. A two-step cascade and statistical multifragmentation calculation is consistent with this assumption. [copyright] [ital 1999] [ital The American Physical Society]