Production of highly excited nuclei in reactions induced by intermediate-energy particles

Predictions of the intranuclear-cascade model taking into account the trawling of a target nucleus by cascade particles have been compared with the results of the latest experiments that recorded all decay products (nucleons, extremely light nuclei, and medium-mass fragments) in coincidence, along with the excitation energy E* of residual nuclei formed in the interactions of intermediate-energy particles with protons, antiprotons, and He-3 nuclei. Good agreement between the theoretical and experimental results has been obtained for multiplicity distributions of decay products and for excitation-energy distributions of residual nuclei. It has been shown that hot nuclei with excitation energies in the range 0.5 < E* < 1 GeV are produced with a sizable probability in the deep-inelastic interactions of intermediate-energy particles with nuclei. In such collisions, the most copious production of hot nuclei is induced by antiprotons for primary energies in the region T < 1 GeV and by He-3 and He-4 nuclei for primary energies in the region T > 3 GeV. The shape of residual nuclei have been calculated. For nuclei produced in nearly central collisions, it proved to be markedly different from the spherical one.