Nuclear Thermometry

The concept of a nuclear temperature was introduced some seventy years ago in pioneering works performed by Bethe [1] and Weisskopf [2]. The goal was to describe the formation and the decay of a compound nucleus in reactions induced by light projectiles, mostly neutrons. Later on, the concept of a nuclear temperature was extended to reactions involving highenergy projectiles and heavy ions [3]. These new studies were triggered by the quest for nuclear instabilities and a possible liquid-gas phase transition in nuclear matter [4,5]. To this goal, different experimental methods were developed and applied to extract information on thermal characteristics of highly excited nuclear systems (see e.g. [6] and references therein).