Heating nuclear matter with GeV 3He beams

The heating curve for hot nuclei formed in the 4.8 GeV 3He+natAg, 197Au reactions has been derived from reconstructed excitation-energy distributions and temperatures based on 2,3H/3,4He isotope ratios. Intranuclear-cascade predictions over-estimate the excitation-energy distributions for hot thermal-like residues, but are in general agreement with the data when contributions from preequilibrium emission are included. Both targets exhibit nearly an identical temperature vs. excitation energy dependence. The heating curve initially increases rapidly, undergoes a slope change near E∗/A = 2–3 MeV, and then follows a gradual monotonic increase up to E∗/A = 10 MeV. The results are in qualitative agreement with predictions of EES and SMM multifragmentation models.