Bimodality in spectator fragmentation
Abstract
The fluctuations of the largest fragment charge of a partition and of the charge asymmetries of the two or three largest fragments in spectator decays following 197Au + 197Au collisions at 1000 MeV per nucleon are investigated. The observed bimodal distributions at specific values of the sorting variable Zbound exhibit features known from percolation theory where they appear as finite-size effects. The underlying configurational fluctuations seem generic for fragmentation processes in small systems.
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