Examination of cluster production in excited light systems at Fermi energies from new experimental data and comparison with transport model calculations

Four different reactions, 32S+12C and 20Ne+12C at 25 and 50 MeV/nucleon, have been measured with the FAZIA detector capable of full isotopic identification of most forward emitted reaction products. Fragment multiplicities, angular distributions and energy spectra have been measured and compared with Monte Carlo simulations, i.e., the antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) and the heavy-ion phase space exploration (HIPSE) models. These models are combined with two different afterburner codes (HFℓ and SIMON) to describe the decay of the excited primary fragments. In the case of AMD, the effect of including the clustering and interclustering processes to form bound particles and fragments is discussed. A clear confirmation of the role of the cluster aggregation in the reaction dynamics and particle production for these light systems, for which the importance of the clustering process increases with bombarding energy, is obtained.