In-medium effects in central heavy ion collisions at intermediate energies

Energy dissipation and cluster production in central nuclear collisions in the Fermi energy range have been investigated using the large INDRA database. A study of the in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross section, σNN∗, has been performed by comparing the results of a model with the measured isotropy ratio of the kinetic energy distributions of the detected protons. This analysis has been done for a large variety of systems at various incident energies from 20 to 100 MeV/nucleon and confirms nicely previous results with enhanced statistics in a full Monte Carlo treatment. Most importantly, it is found that σNN∗ is drastically reduced as compared to the vacuum values, due partly to Pauli blocking but also to in-medium effects for which mean values and uncertainties are given. Concerning the cluster production, a coalescence model has been developed to study the parallel and perpendicular velocity distributions of the light clusters (A≤4). For AC=3 (H3, He3), it is found that the mean internal kinetic energy of the nucleons in the cluster is reduced as compared to the vacuum value. These two results shows that any comparison between experimental and theoretical predictions in heavy-ions induced reactions around and above the Fermi energy must take into account these in-medium effects.