Cluster production and correlations in nuclear molecular dynamics Original Research Article

The formation of nuclear fragments in intermediate energy heavy ion reactions is studied within a molecular dynamics model, recently developed in Copenhagen. Observable characteristics such as fragment mass distributions, multiplicities of intermediate mass fragments (IMFs) and charged particles, fragment-fragment velocity correlations are calculated for Kr + Au and Au + Au reactions and compared with data at different bombarding energies. The data are well reproduced at beam energies above 100 MeV per nucleon. The sideward flow and the fragment-fragment correlations depend sensitively on the in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross section.