The dynamical cluster-decay model (DCM), a nonstatistical description developed by Gupta and collaborators to account for the decay studies of excited compound nuclei formed in low-energy reactions has been applied to study various reactions. One of the main ingredient of the model is the use of temperature-dependent binding energies. In the present work, the effect of temperature-dependent binding energies in the model is analyzed. In earlier works on the DCM, the temperature-dependent liquid drop energy from Davidson et al.'s work [N. J. Davidson, S. S. Hsiao, J. Markram, H. G. Miller, and Y. Tzeng, Nucl. Phys. A 570, 61 (1994)], with two of its constants refitted for each isotopic chain to reproduce ground-state experimental binding energies, is used. In this work, the temperature-dependent binding energy formulas of Krappe [H. J. Krappe, Phys. Rev. C 59, 2640 (1999)] and Guet et al. [C. Guet, E. Strumberger, and M. Brack, Phys. Lett. B 205, 427 (1988)] are used in the DCM without any refitting of the coefficient of the liquid drop needed to study the decay of the hot and rotating 56 Ni * system formed in the 32 S + 24 Mg reaction at two incident energies, E c.m. = 51.6 and 60.5 MeV. The use of Krappe's formula results in the explicit preference of a four-nucleon transfer, indicating a strong minima in the potential energies corresponding to α-structured nuclei as well as exhibiting structural effects in the preformation calculations favoring α-structured nuclei. The overall cross sections for the light particles and intermediate mass fragments are nicely reproduced by the use of Krappe's formula. However, the individual channel cross-sections exhibit a strong distribution only for α nuclei, and for other fragments the results are lower by a factor of 2 to 3. The use of Guet et al.'s formula though does not show any explicit structure effects in the potential energy calculations or the preformation calculations; the overall cross sections calculated for light particles and intermediate mass fragments compare well with the experimental data. The results of individual channel cross-sections, however, do not exhibit any explicit preference for the α-structured nuclei; rather, the individual channel cross sections decreases with an increase in the mass number of the fragments. The calculated average kinetic energies using both formulas for the favored α fragments compares well with experimental values. Without any refitting of the coefficients of the temperature-dependent binding energies, the DCM works out well and the explicit preference of α structure depends mainly on the choice of formula used.
