Towards an understanding of staggering effects in dissipative binary collisions

The reactions 32S + 58,64Ni are studied at 14.5 A MeV. Evidence is found for important odd-even effects in isotopic observables of selected peripheral collisions corresponding to the decay of a projectile-like source. The influence of secondary decays on the staggering is studied with a correlation function technique. It is shown that this method is a powerful tool to get experimental information on the evaporation chain. in order to constrain model calculations. Specifically, we show that odd-even effects are due to interplay between pairing effects in the nuclear masses and in the level densities.