Measurement of Fragmentation Products including Angular Distributions for 3, 5, and 10 GeV/A C and Si on several nuclear targets at the AGS

Motivated by differences in the predicted fragmentation of heavy ions at energies around 5 GeV/A as employed in the event generators used by the FLUKA Monte Carlo Code [1], a set of measurements were carried out at the AGS facility at the Brookhaven National Laboratory to determine as much information as possible about the cross sections to allow harmonization of those event generators for these incident lab energies. The FLUKA Code employs the RQMD event generator of Sorge [2] for heavy ion interactions starting at 100 MeV/A and extending into the region around 5 GeV/A. Above those energies the DPMJET code of Ranft and Roesler [3] is typically employed to simulate such interactions. The detailed predictions of these event generators had some disagreement in the vicinity of this crossover energy and in order to tune these codes to be in closer harmony at the transition, and of course to be simulating nature as closely as possible, data were taken at 3, 5 and 10 GeV/A with beams of Fe, Si and C on a variety of targets including C, Al. Fe and Cu. The Fe data have not been fully analyzed, but results from the C and Si beams are available and the forward fragment spectrum along with a measurementof the charged particle angular distribution in a set of Si strip detectors out to about 45 degrees in the lab are available. These include sufficient statistics to provide the charged particle distributions as a function of the major projectile fragment. The detectors used in this measurement were based on what were reasonably available to us, and as such were limited in capability, and required separate data acquisition systems. Nevertheless, spectra were obtained that should be sufficient to enable the harmonization of the event generator codes at the crossover energy. This paper discusses only the experimental results and not the impact of those results on the FLUKA code.