Fusion and decay in 24Mg+12C at 45 A MeV

Abstract Complete events with at least 83% of the total charge of the 24 Mg+ 12 C system has been investigated at 45  A  MeV with a large multidetector array. Central single-source events are selected by use of the Statistical Discriminant Analysis Method. Two-fragment reduced-velocity correlation functions are measured for the emission of intermediate-mass fragments from single-source events. Many-body trajectory calculations with a surface sequential model indicate an emission time of ≈400 fm/ c suggesting that a large part of the single-source data can be described in a sequential decay picture. At the highest reconstructed excitation energy limit (≈8–10  A  MeV), a mean emission time of ≈200 fm/ c is deduced showing that part of the data may be explained by an instantaneous multifragmentation scenario.