Scaling Law for the Partitioning of Energy in Fragmenting Multicharged Carbon Clusters

The complete fragmentation of highly excited and multicharged C-n(q+) clusters (n = 5-10; q = 2-4), produced in high velocity collisions of C-n(+) with atoms, has been measured. Multiplicity distributions are presented and used to deduce, within a statistical framework, the partitioning of energy between the fragments' production and fragments' kinetic energy. This partitioning is found to scale as the charge over mass ratio of the cluster.