A new model for production of fast light clusters in spallation reactions Original Research Article

A model is proposed to describe emission of light charged clusters during the cascade stage in nucleon-induced spallation reactions. It consists in implementing a surface percolation procedure into the Liège intranuclear cascade (INCL4) model: when a nucleon is ready to leave the nuclear surface, it is allowed to drag along a cluster of nucleons, under some conditions of closeness in phase space. This possibility relies on the instantaneous dynamical phase space occupancy in the nuclear surface. The following clusters are considered: View the MathML source. Good agreement is obtained with experimental data relative to heavy and medium-heavy targets at two different energies. It is shown that the implementation of light cluster emission in the cascade stage also improves our previous results for residue mass spectra.