Nuclear interferometry and thermal freeze out

The technique of nuclear interferometry is applied to proton and light fragment emission in intermediate energy heavy ion reactions. It is shown that the source radii extracted by the technique are consistently larger for correlations involving two deuterons than for those with two protons. The time scale involved in particle emission is investigated with the technique and places a rough upper bound of a few times ${10}^{\mathrm{-}22}$ sec on the time scale associated with the source. A cascade model is formulated to predict the source parameters, and these are found to be in at least qualitative agreement with experiment. The implications of these results for the emission of heavier fragments are discussed.