Observables in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

This is the final report of a one-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The authors used several complimentary models of high-energy nuclear collisions to systematically study the large body of available data from high energy (p{sub beam}/A > 10 GeV/c) heavy ion experiments at BNL and CERN and to prepare for the data that will come from RHIC. One major goal of this project was to better understand the space-time history of the excited hadronic matter formed in these collisions and to use this understanding to improve models of this process. The space-time structure of the system can be extracted from measurements of single-particle p{sub T} distributions and multiparticle correlations. They looked for experimental effects of the formation of the quark-gluon plasma. Understanding the hadronic phase of the interaction determines the sensitivity of experimental measurements to the presence of this exotic state of matter