Elliptical flow and isospin effects in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies

The elliptical flow of fragments is studied for different systems at incident energies between 50 and 1000 MeV/nucleon using the isospin-dependent quantum molecular dynamics (IQMD) model. Our findings reveal that elliptical flow shows a transition from positive (in-plane) to negative (out-of-plane) values in the midrapidity region at a certain incident energy known as the transition energy. This transition energy is found to depend on the model ingredients, size of the fragments, and composite mass of the reacting system as well as on the impact parameter of the reaction. A reasonable agreement is observed for the excitation function of elliptical flow between the data and our calculations. Interestingly, the transition energy is found to exhibit a power-law mass dependence.