Systematic studies of light neutron-rich nuclei produced via the fragmentation of 40Ar

Radioactive isotopes of beryllium to phosphorus were produced by projectile fragmentation of an Ar-40 beam with either a Be, Ni, or Ta target at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. The fragmentation cross sections, parallel momentum transfers, and widths were systematically measured and compared to the empirical parametrization of EPAX and to predictions from internuclear cascade and deep inelastic codes. The predicted distributions for the widths from the internuclear cascade simulations agree to within one standard deviation with the measured results, whereas the velocities and cross sections are found to be more consistent with the deep-inelastic-transfer calculations. A target dependence was found in the reaction cross sections for the neutron-rich nuclei with the largest N/Z, suggesting an enhancement in the fragment yields larger N/Z targets.