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U.S. Department of Energy
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Pion pictures of heavy ion collisions

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:5679226

Pion production and interference effects are investigated as tools to view the equation of state for high density nuclear matter created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The first chapter includes analyses of coherence effects and coulomb interactions on the Bose-Einstein interference of pions which is used to infer the size and lifetime of the pion emitting region. These corrections are shown to affect the inferred source size by 20%. In the second chapter these effects are discussed as a tool for viewing ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Several dynamical scenarios are considered for the phase transition into quark-gluon plasma. Experimental signatures for a first order phase transition are predicted for certain collisions and recommendations for future experiments are made. The third chapter considers pion production using chemical reaction rates in the context of hydrodynamic expansion of hot matter created by Ar-KCl collisions at 1.8 GeV per nucleon. The addition of compressional energies into the equation of state is shown to reduce the pion yield enough to agree with experiment. By varying several initial conditions the ability to infer an equation of state from counting pions is evaluated.

Research Organization:
Minnesota Univ., Minneapolis (USA)
OSTI ID:
5679226
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English