A study of projectile fragmentation in high energy nuclear collisions

Momentum distributions of light mass (A ≤ 4) beam rapidity fragments are presented in reactions of 28Si + Al, Cu, and Pb. The momentum widths are found to increase with increasing projectile-target overlap. This dependence can not be explained in terms of the Fermi momentum of nucleons in the projectile nucleus alone. The author also compares the momentum distributions of protons with the spectator proton momentum distributions of Si in Si + Pb interactions simulated by the HIJET event generator and point out the significance of studying the fragmentation in understanding the global dynamics of heavy ion collisions