Intermittency in the multifragmentation of hot nuclei?

The statistical decay of an equilibrated hot nucleus is modeled by sampling the microcanonical phase space for nuclear fragmentation. It is shown to reproduce the measured fluctuations and correlations (intermittency) in data for 1 GeV/nucleon ${}_{79}{}^{197}{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{Au}$ on emulsion. Within our model multifragmentation is linked to the nuclear liquid-to-gas phase transition. The model is used to realistically study the conditions leading to the phenomenon of intermittency in critical heavy-ion reactions.