Is the caloric curve a robust signal of the phase transition in hot nuclei?

Abstract

The richness of the data set, collected by the INDRA collaboration during the last twenty years, enabled us to build a set of caloric curves for nuclei of various sizes, by using, for the first time, a single experimental set-up and a single experimental protocol. We will therefore present the different caloric curves ($E^{\ast}-T$) obtained by a new calorimetry, for Quasi-Projectiles produced by symmetric or quasi symmetric reactions at different incident energies (Au+Au, Xe+Sn, Ni+Ni). For all these systems, a clear change of the de-excitation process of hot nuclei is observed but this one is neither a plateau nor a back-bending, but a sudden change of slope.