Thermal equilibrium in strongly damped collisions

Energy division between colliding nuclei in damped collisions is studied in the statistical nucleon exchange model. The reactions ${}_{}{}^{56}{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{Ho}$ and ${}_{}{}^{56}{}_{}{}^{}$Fe${+\mathrm{}}^{238}$U at incident energy of 465 MeV are considered for this purpose. It is found that the excitation energy is approximately equally shared between the nuclei for the peripheral collisions and the systems slowly approach equilibrium for more central collisions. This is in conformity with the recent experimental observations. The calculated variances of the charge distributions are found to depend appreciably on the temperature and are in very good agreement with the experimental data.