Staggering in S+Ni collisions

Odd-even effects in fragment production have been studied since a long time and never quantitatively understood. The odd-even anomaly was reported in the literature [1,2] to be more pronounced in reactions involving Ni projectile and targets, in particular in n-poor systems. In some experiments [1,2] the magnitude of the odd-even effect is found to be related to the isospin of the projectile and/or the target. From a theoretical point of view, odd-even effects in fragmentation reactions are clearly linked to the pairing residual interaction and its dependence on temperature.