Emission of intermediate mass fragments from hot 116Ba* formed in low-energy 58Ni+58Ni reaction

The complex fragments (or intermediate mass fragments) observed in the low-energy Ni-58 + Ni-58 --> Ba-116* reaction, are studied within the dynamical cluster-decay model for s-wave with the use of the temperature-dependent liquid drop, Coulomb and proximity energies. The important result is that, due to the temperature effects in liquid drop energy, the explicit preference for a-like fragments is washed out, though the C-12 (or the complementary Sn-104) decay is still predicted to be one of the most probable a-nucleus decays for this reaction. The production rates for non-alpha-like intermediate mass fragments (IMFs) are now higher and the light-particle production is shown to accompany the IMFs at all incident energies, without involving any statistical evaporation process in the model. The comparisons between the experimental data and the (s-wave) calculations for IMF production cross sections are rather satisfactory and the contributions from other l-waves need to be added for a further improvement of these comparisons and for calculations of the total kinetic energies of fragments.