Velocity correlations of intermediate mass fragments (IMF), produced in collisions of Au+Au at 100, 150, 250, and 400A MeV beam energy, are extracted from measurements with the 4π detector system (FOPI) in construction stage I at Schwerionen-Synchrotron (SIS) at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt. The IMF correlation functions of peripheral and semicentral events are found to be strongly affected by the collective sideward motion of nuclear matter. The sideflow causes an enhancement of correlations at small relative velocities. This enhancement results from the mixing of differently azimuthally oriented events; it vanishes if the events are rotated into a unique reaction plane. Selecting violent central collisions, the comparison of the data with a Coulomb dominated final-state interaction model points to a radius of the expanding and multifragmenting source of ${\mathit{R}}_{\mathit{s}}$≃13 fm for 100A MeV which appears shrinking by 20% when increasing the projectile energy to 400 MeV per nucleon. The deduced source radii are found to depend on the radial explosion energy used in the model. The inclusion of such a collective expansion is necessary for a reasonable description of the experimental single-particle spectra of the IMF. The unique Coulomb suppression of small relative IMF velocities, found for the given beam energy range, is attributed to rather constant averaged next-neighbor distances 〈${\mathit{d}}_{\mathrm{IMF}}$〉=8.6±0.2 fm of the IMF charge centers within the source at breakup time.

• Received 30 September 1994

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.51.2686