Emission of intermediate-mass fragments in the interaction of 16O with 59Co, 93Nb and 197Au

In this paper we study the emission of 8Begs, B and N fragments in the interaction of 16O ions with 59Co, 93Nb and 197Au at incident energies varying from 6 to 25 MeV/nucleon. The spectra of these fragments, as well as those of C fragments studied in a previous paper, are dominated at forward angles by a component originating from break-up of 16O. At the higher incident energies break-up occurs after quite a sizeable projectile energy loss. Another mechanism which dominates at large emission angles, favours the emission of low-energy fragments and is attributed to the coalescence of nucleons during the cascade of nucleon-nucleon interactions by means of which the excited nuclei produced in the primary two-ion interaction thermalize.