Exclusive study of the formation and the decay of hot nuclei in the intermediate energy domain

A brief review of exclusive measurements performed at GANIL in order to study hot nuclei will be given. Heavy-ion induced reactions on heavy targets have been investigated over a wide range of incident energy, using various techniques: - fission fragment angular correlations. - 4 π neutron multiplicity measurements. - light charged particle correlations. In each case, a selection of the most violent collisions can be achieved. For central collisions induced by 40Ar, a same excitation energy of about 650 MeV is deduced from the totally different and independent sets of data, corresponding to an average temperature of 5 MeV. At 60 MeV/u, this value is quite low as compare to the total available energy for central collisions A tentative explanation based on Landau-Vlasov simulations will be proposed: the excitation energy dissipated in the system could be stored in a highly excited compression mode as well as under a thermal form. Some recent results on the Kr+Au system at 32 MeV/u will be presented indicating that heavier projectiles than 40Ar can lead to a temperature of the hot system approaching 7 MeV