The Role of Phase Space in Complex Fragment Emission from Low to Intermediate Energies

The experimental emission probabilities of complex fragments by low energy compound nuclei and their dependence upon energy and atomic number are compared to the transition state rates. Intermediate-mass-fragment multiplicity distributions for a variety of reactions at intermediate energies are shown to be binomial and thus reducible at all measured transverse energies. From these distributions a single binary event probability can be extracted which has a thermal dependence. A strong thermal signature is also found in the charge distributions. The n-fold charge distributions are reducible to the 1-fold charge distributions through a simple scaling dictated by fold number and charge conservation.