Fragment production has been studied as a function of the source mass and
excitation energy in peripheral collisions of 35Cl+197Au at 43
MeV/nucleon and 70Ge+natTi at 35 MeV/nucleon. The results are
compared to the Au+Au data at 600 MeV/nucleon obtained by the ALADIN
collaboration. A mass scaling, by Asource∼ 35 to 190, strongly
correlated to excitation energy per nucleon, is presented, suggesting a thermal
fragment production mechanism. Comparisons to a standard sequential decay model
and the lattice-gas model are made. Fragment emission from a hot, rotating
source is unable to reproduce the experimental source size scaling.Comment: 13 pages LaTeX file, including 3 postscript figures (in .tar.gz
fornmat), accepted in Phys. Rev. C . Also available at
http://thomson.phy.ulaval.ca/ions_lourds/gil-en.htm