Study of the evaporative decay of excited ⁸⁸Mo nuclei produced in almost mass-symmetric reactions at 6--12 MeV/amu

Medium-mass nuclei (A ≈ 100) are predicted to be candidates for shape phase transitions at high spin. Experimental studies on their decay are however rather scarce in the literature. In this work some results on the characteristics of charged species emitted by excited ⁸⁸Mo compound nuclei produced in the reaction ⁴⁸Ti +⁴⁰ Ca are presented. Three bombarding energies were measured, 300, 450, 600 MeV, in order to better follow the evolution of the fusion-evaporation and fusion-fission channels. The experiment was carried out with a setup featuring an efficient detector for charged products coupled to a BaF2 scintillator array for hard photons. In this paper we only deal with charged products, neglecting the coincident gamma ray events elsewhere described. Experimental data have been compared with the prediction of the statistical model in its implementation in the Gemini++ code, well suited even for high spin systems.