Comment on “Fragment distributions for highly charged systems”

An article by Williams et al. fails to find evidence for critical behavior in central collisions of 35–400 MeV/nucleon 84Kr+197Au. On this basis, and because of the effect of secondary decay on the fragment charge distribution, these authors question the validity of the critical exponents obtained b...
Ausführliche Beschreibung

An article by Williams et al. fails to find evidence for critical behavior in central collisions of 35–400 MeV/nucleon 84Kr+197Au. On this basis, and because of the effect of secondary decay on the fragment charge distribution, these authors question the validity of the critical exponents obtained by the EOS Collaboration for 1 GeV/nucleon Au+C. It is shown that the experiment by Williams et al. was not optimized to search for critical behavior and that the effect of secondary decay at the excitation energy corresponding to the critical point in the Au + C system is small. Ausführliche Beschreibung