Searching for the Nuclear Liquid-Gas Phase Transition in Au + Au Collisions at 35 MeV/nucleon

Within the framework of Classical Molecular Dynamics, we study the collision Au + Au at an incident energy of 35 MeV/nucleon. It is found that the system shows a critical behaviour at peripheral impact parameters, revealed through the analysis of conditional moments of charge distributions, Campi Scatter Plot, and the occurrence of large fluctuations in the region of the Campi plot where this critical behaviour is expected. When applying the experimental filters of the MULTICS-MINIBALL apparatus, it is found that criticality signals can be hidden due to the inefficiency of the experimental apparatus. The signals are then recovered by identifying semi-peripheral and peripheral collisions looking to the velocity distribution of the largest fragment, then by selecting the most complete events.Comment: RevTex file, 21 pages + 19 figures available upon request from [email protected]