Statistical calculations of nuclear fragment distributions

The recursive techniques developed by Mekjian and collaborators for exact calculations of canonical partition functions of fragmenting systems are extended to allow the determination of fragment multiplicity distributions. The fragment multiplicity distribution is shown to become strongly super-Poissonian at the critical temperature. This behavior is shown to be highly sensitive to Coulomb effects and to whether energy is strictly conserved (the microcanonical ensemble). Additionally, a method is presented for generating events from the partition functions, which also permits the inclusion of hard-sphere interactions between fragments.