Spectator matter fragmentation in Au+Au reactions: Phase space analysis

Clusterization in phase space has been analyzed for peripheral Au+Au reactions at 1000 AMeV using simulated annealing clusterization algorithm (SACA). We investigate how these fragments are correlated in phase space and compare our model calculations with minimum spanning tree (MST) method. Our theoretical study highlights the importance of binding energy criterion in recognizing the fragment structure. MST method however, fails to break-up the spectator matter effectively and thus under-estimates the multiplicity of intermediate mass fragments (IMFs).