Study of The Interaction of Relativistic Uranium Ions with Light Target Atoms

Interaction studies of uranium ions having an energy of 960 MeV/u with a CR-39 target have been made. CR-39, a polycarbonate (C12H18O7) was used as the target as well as the detector of the incident beam and of the reaction products. Binary fission has been confirmed to be the most prominent mode of interaction. However, some higher order fission events along with events having exceptionally high multiplicities (clusters containing 30 and higher number of small tracks) have been observed. It appears from the reaction kinetics and the development properties of etch product tracks, that these high multiplicity events do not originate from radioactive contaminations within the CR-39 detector.