Production and signature of extremely dense baryon matter produced with the Au beam at the AGS

Journal Article · Thu Apr 01 04:00:00 EST 1993 · Bulletin of the American Physical Society

OSTI ID:243679

Sorge, H ^[1]

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1. Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)

The Au beam at the BNL-AGS offers the unique opportunity to study extremely compressed nuclear matter by colliding two truly heavy ions. This is the first heavy ion beam at an ultrarelativistic energy (beam momentum 11.6 AGeV/c), while its predecessors, e.g. at the BEVALAC, were restricted to the one GeV energy range. In this work such reactions are studied in the framework of a microscopic phasespace model (RGMD) in which resonance and string excitation and decay is followed by mean field interaction and rescattering between all hadrons, the newly produced as well as the originally ingoing hadrons. One key variable to reach extremely high baryon densities is the nuclear stopping power. The finding is that the initial rapidity gap at 10-15 AGeV of roughly 3 units is sufficiently small that two heavy nuclei are stopping each other in central collisions. Then a nearly equilibrated, long-lived ({approx}8 fm/c) central region of high baryon density (>5 {rho}{sub 0}) is produced. Signatures of this intermediate reaction stage which can be extracted from final observables are a strong strangeness enhancement and collective flow. A combined effort of experimental measurements, e.g. of the mass shift of the rho peak, and theoretical studies will allow to gain information on hadron dispersion relations in extremely dense baryon matter and eventually on the transition region from a hadronic resonance gas to quark matter.

• OSTI ID: 243679
• Report Number(s): CONF-9304297--
• Journal Information: Bulletin of the American Physical Society, Journal Name: Bulletin of the American Physical Society Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 38; ISSN 0003-0503; ISSN BAPSA6
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

66 PHYSICS
DEEP INELASTIC HEAVY ION REACTIONS
GEV RANGE 100-1000
GOLD 197 REACTIONS
GOLD 197 TARGET
NUCLEAR MATTER
STOPPING POWER