On the Effects of Unequal Masses in the Statistics of Three-and Four-Body Interactions

Abstract

Numerical experiments have been performed to study the influence of different masses on the outcome of three- and four-body interactions. The study is statistical in nature and attention is drawn especially to the escape probabilities of various masses and to the energy distributions. The probability of escape of a certain mass from an unstable three-body system may be approximated by a power law in which the power depends on angular momentum. However, if the angular momentum is very small this approximation is not very good. In four-body systems the mass-dependence was found to be somewhat less strong than in three-body systems. A surprising result is that energy distributions seem to be fairly independent of masses, unless special initial conditions or very large mass ratios are considered.