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Fission excitation functions have been measured for a chain of neighboring compound nuclei, from 207Po to 212Po. We present a new analysis which provides a determination of the fission barriers and ground state shell effects with nearly spectroscopic accuracy. The improved accuracy achieved in this analysis may lead to a future detailed exploration of the saddle mass surface and its spectroscopy. The sensitivity of the fission probabilities on shell effects extends to excitation energies of 150 MeV and negates recent claims for the disappearance of shell corrections due to collective effects., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

Fission in 3He and 4He induced reactions at excitation energies between the fission barrier and 140 MeV has been investigated. Twentythree fission excitation functions of various compound nuclei in different mass regions are shown to scale exactly according to the transition state prediction once the shell effects are accounted for. New precise measurements of excitation functions in a mass region where shell effects are very strong, allow one to test the predictions with an even higher accuracy. The fact that no deviations from the transition state method have been observed within the experimentally investigated excitation energy regime allows one to assign limits for the fission transient time. The precise measurement of fission excitation functions of neighboring isotopes enables us to experimentally estimate the first chance fission probability. Even if only first chance fission is investigated, no evidence for fission transient times larger than 30 zs can be found., Comment: 14 pages, TeX, psfig, also available at http://csa5.lbl.gov/moretto/ps/rubehn_lbnl39895.ps, Proc. of the XXXV. International Winter Meeting on Nuclear Physics, Bormio, Italy (1997)

Electromagnetic fission cross sections for the reactions U + (Be, C, Al, Cu, In, Au, U) at E/A = 0.6 and 1.0 GeV are compared to theoretical calculations using recently proposed quantum-mechanical equivalent-photon spectra. In contrast to semi-classical calculations, systematically lower cross sections are obtained that cannot reproduce the experimental results. Furthermore, we point out that the study of electromagnetic fission cross sections or electromagnetic 1-neutron removal cross sections alone cannot provide unambiguous information on the excitation of the double giant dipole resonance., Comment: 4 pages, TeX, psfig, also available at http://csa5.lbl.gov/moretto/ps/emd_qm.ps, submitted to Phys. Rev. C

Rutherford backscattering and particle induced x-ray emission have been utilized to precisely characterize targets used in nuclear fission experiments. The method allows for a fast and non destructive determination of target thickness, homogeneity and element composition., Comment: 11 pages, TeX (elsart.sty), psfig, also available at http://csa5.lbl.gov/moretto/ps/rbs_paper.ps, submitted to Nucl. Instr. Meth. A

Fission excitation functions of He-3 and He-4 induced compound nuclei are shown to scale exactly according to the Bohr-Wheeler transition state prediction once the shell effects are accounted for. The presented method furthermore allows one to model-independently extract values for the shell effects which are in good agreement to those obtained from liquid-drop model calculations. The fact that no deviations from the transition state method have been observed within the experimentally investigated excitation energy regime allows one to assign an upper limit for the transient time of 10 zs., Comment: 8 page, TeX type, psfig, to be published in the proccedings of the XII Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, Snowbird, Utah, February 4-10, 1996, ed. by W. Bauer and G. Westfall

Mastinu et al. recently reported the observation of several positive signals possibly indicating critical behavior in peripheral collisions of Au+Au at $E/A$=35 MeV. In our comment, we examine the choice of variables used to determine the presence (or absence) of critical behavior. We do this by repeating the analysis the work of Mastinu et al. on "data" from a simulation with no critical behavior., Comment: 1 page, TeX type, psfig, also available at http://csa5.lbl.gov/moretto/ps/comment_no_bc.ps, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett.

A new, sensitive method allows one to search for the enhancement of events with nearly equal-sized fragments as predicted by theoretical calculations based on volume or surface instabilities. Simulations have been performed to investigate the sensitivity of the procedure. Experimentally, charge correlations of intermediate mass fragments emitted from heavy ion reactions at intermediate energies have been studied. No evidence for a preferred breakup into equal-sized fragments has been found., Comment: 12 pages, TeX type, psfig, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett, also available at http://csa5.lbl.gov/moretto/ps/zcor_pp.ps

Fission excitation functions of compound nuclei in a mass region where shell effects are expected to be very strong are shown to scale exactly according to the transition state prediction once these shell effects are accounted for. The fact that no deviations from the transition state method have been observed within the experimentally investigated excitation energy regime allows one to assign an upper limit for the transient time of 10 zs., Comment: 7 pages, TeX type, psfig, submitted to Phys. Rev. C, also available at http://csa5.lbl.gov/moretto/ps/he3_paper.ps

Multi-fragment decays of 129Xe, 197Au, and 238U projectiles in collisions with Be, C, Al, Cu, In, Au, and U targets at energies between E/A = 400 MeV and 1000 MeV have been studied with the ALADIN forward-spectrometer at SIS. By adding an array of 84 Si-CsI(Tl) telescopes the solid-angle coverage of the setup was extended to \theta_lab = 16 degree. This permitted the complete detection of fragments from the projectile-spectator source. The dominant feature of the systematic set of data is the Z_bound universality that is obeyed by the fragment multiplicities and correlations. These observables are invariant with respect to the entrance channel if plotted as a function of Z_bound, where Z_bound is the sum of the atomic numbers Z_i of all projectile fragments with Z_i \geq 2. No significant dependence on the bombarding energy nor on the target mass is observed. The dependence of the fragment multiplicity on the projectile mass follows a linear scaling law. The reasons for and the limits of the observed universality of spectator fragmentation are explored within the realm of the available data and with model studies. It is found that the universal properties should persist up to much higher bombarding energies than explored in this work and that they are consistent with universal features exhibited by the intranuclear cascade and statistical multifragmentation models. PACS numbers: 25.70.Mn, 25.70.Pq, 25.75.-q, Comment: Plain Tex, 49 pages including 20 eps figures. Also available from http://www-kp3.gsi.de/www/kp3/aladin_publications.html