The spallation of 56Fe in collisions with hydrogen at 1 A GeV has been
studied in inverse kinematics with the large-aperture setup SPALADIN at GSI.
Coincidences of residues with low-center-of-mass kinetic energy light particles
and fragments have been measured allowing the decomposition of the total
reaction cross-section into the different possible de-excitation channels.
Detailed information on the evolution of these de-excitation channels with
excitation energy has also been obtained. The comparison of the data with
predictions of several de-excitation models coupled to the INCL4 intra-nuclear
cascade model shows that only GEMINI can reasonably account for the bulk of
collected results, indicating that in a light system with no compression and
little angular momentum, multifragmentation might not be necessary to explain
the data.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, revised version accepted in Phys. Rev. Let