Spin dispersion and alignment in deep inelastic collisions

The spins accumulated by the reacting heavy nuclei, their variances and their alignments with respect to the reaction normal in deep inelastic collisions have been calculated in the framework of stochastic exchange of single nucleons on a potential energy surface. The effects due to temperature and shell gap in the single particle spectra on the spin observables have also been studied. It is found that though the presence of the gap reduces the spin gain, its effect on alignment is small. Temperature is found to have an insignificant role on all the spin observables studied. The relative spin orientations of the reacting partners are found to be strongly sensitive to the presence of the dynamical barrier between them. 22 refs