INDRA collaboration

Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 172701PublishedPublishedPublished PRL 110, (2013) 172701

link to HAL preprint

Distributions of the largest fragment charge, Zmax, in multifragmentation reactions around the Fermi energy can be decomposed into a sum of a Gaussian and a Gumbel distribution, whereas at much higher or lower energies one or the other distribution is asymptotically dominant. We demonstrate the same generic behavior for the largest cluster size in critical aggregation models for small systems, in or out of equilibrium, around the critical point. By analogy with the time-dependent irreversible aggregation model, we infer that distributions are characteristic of the multifragmentation time-scale, which is largely determined by the onset of radial expansion in this energy range.