Emission patterns of neutral pions in 40A MeV Ta plus Au reactions

Differential cross sections of neutral pions emitted in {sup 181}Ta+{sup 197}Au collisions at a beam energy of 39.5A MeV have been measured with the two-arm photon spectrometer (TAPS). The kinetic energy and transverse momentum spectra of neutral pions cannot be properly described in the framework of the thermal model, nor when the reabsorption of pions is accounted for in a phenomenological model. However, high energy and high momentum tails of the pion spectra can be well fitted through thermal distributions with unexpectedly soft temperature parameters below 10 MeV.