Towards an understanding of staggering effects in dissipative binary collisions

The reactions are studied at 14.5 A MeV. Evidence is found for important odd–even effects in isotopic observables of selected peripheral collisions corresponding to the decay of a projectile-like source. The influence of secondary decays on the staggering is studied with a correlation function technique. It is shown that this method is a powerful tool to get experimental information on the evaporation chain, in order to constrain model calculations. Specifically, we show that odd–even effects are due to interplay between pairing effects in the nuclear masses and in the level densities.