Searching for the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition in Au+Au collisions at 35 MeV/nucleon

Within the framework of classical molecular dynamics, we study the collision Au+Au at an incident energy of 35 MeV/nucleon. It is found that the system shows a critical behavior at peripheral impact parameters, revealed through the analysis of conditional moments of charge distributions, Campi scatter plot, and the occurrence of large fluctuations in the region of the Campi plot where this critical behavior is expected. When applying the experimental filters of the MULTICS-MINIBALL apparatus, it is found that criticality signals can be hidden due to the inefficiency of the experimental apparatus. The signals are recovered by identifying semiperipheral and peripheral collisions looking to the velocity distribution of the largest fragment, and selecting the most complete events. copyright 1996 The American Physical Society