SHARP TRANSITIONS IN NUCLEAR-DYNAMICS - LIMITS TO COLLECTIVITY AND STABILITY

Two limiting cases of nuclear dynamics are analysed in details: the disappearing of giant collective motions in hot nuclei and the nuclear disassembly in violent heavy ion collisions. It is shown that sharp transitions occur in the dynamical behaviour of finite nuclei. For collective vibration built on excited states we get a dramatic increase of the widths due to the enhancement of two body collisions with increasing temperature. The case of hot Giant Dipole Resonances (GDR) is discussed. As a consequence of the competition with neutron evaporation we get a sharp quenching of giant photon emission. Pre-equilibrium effects on the GDR formation are also accounted for. Limiting temperatures for the observation of GDR gamma-decays are deduced for various nuclei, ranging from 6.0 to 3.5 MeV with increasing mass number. A detailed study of the onset of a new multifragmentation mechanism in violent heavy ion collisions around 50 MeV/u beam energy for symmetric partners is performed. It is shown that the nuclear system enters a dynamical instability region and fragments are directly produced from the growing of fluctuations. An hybrid model is developped just coupling average informations on the system entering the critical region to a statistical multifragmentration decay picture. Some hints towards a fully dynamical description of fragment production are finally discussed.