Dynamics and thermodynamics of fragment emission from excited sources

In this paper we study the process of fragmentation of highly excited Lennard-Jones drops by studying the emission of stable fragments (clusters recognizable in configuration space that live more than a minimum lifetime). We focus on the dynamics and thermodynamics of the emitting sources and show, among other things, that this kind of process is a mixture of sequential and simultaneous events and that simultaneous events have a broad time distribution. We also show how a local equilibrium scenario comes up on top of expanding collective motion, allowing us to define and explore a local temperature, which turns out to be a strongly time-dependent quantity, signaling that we are facing an out-of-equilibrium process.