Core-corona separation in the UrQMD hybrid model

We employ the UrQMD transport + hydrodynamics hybrid model to estimate the effects of a separation of the hot equilibrated core and the dilute corona created in high energy heavy ion collisions. It is shown that the fraction of the system which can be regarded as an equilibrated fireball changes over a wide range of energies. This has an impact especially on strange particle abundancies. We show that such a core corona separation allows to improve the description of strange particle ratios and flow as a function of beam energy as well as strange particle yields as a function of centrality.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, version accepted by PR

Resonance Production in RHIC Collisions

Results of resonance particle production measured at RHIC in $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} =$ 200 GeV Au+Au collisions are compared to measurements in p+p and d+Au collisions in order to verify the existence of an extended hardronically interacting medium. Yield and momentum distributions of resonances maybe modified during the fireball lifetime due to resonance decay and the subsequent rescattering of their decay daughters as well as the regeneration of resonances from their decay products. Modified momentum spectra in heavy ion collisions may change the nuclear modification factor R$_{\rm AA}$. The influence on the elliptic flow v$_{2}$ due to late regeneration of resonances is discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, Proceedings of the 22st Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, San Diago, California, 12-18 March, 200

Hadronization conditions in relativistic nuclear collisions and the QCD pseudo-critical line

We compare the reconstructed hadronization conditions in relativistic nuclear collisions in the nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy range 4.7-2760 GeV in terms of temperature and baryon-chemical potential with lattice QCD calculations, by using hadronic multiplicities. We obtain hadronization temperatures and baryon chemical potentials with a fit to measured multiplicities by correcting for the effect of post-hadronization rescattering. The post-hadronization modification factors are calculated by means of a coupled hydrodynamical-transport model simulation under the same conditions of approximate isothermal and isochemical decoupling as assumed in the statistical hadronization model fits to the data. The fit quality is considerably better than without rescattering corrections, as already found in previous work. The curvature of the obtained "true" hadronization pseudo-critical line kappa is found to be 0.0048 +- 0.0026, in agreement with lattice QCD estimates; the pseudo-critical temperature at vanishing mu_B is found to be 164.3+-1.8 MeV.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Minor corrections, version published in PL

Directed flow, a signal for the phase transition in Relativistic Nuclear Collisions?

The sign change of the slope of the directed flow of baryons has been predicted as a signal for a first order phase transition within fluid dynamical calculations. Recently, the directed flow of identified particles has been measured by the STAR collaboration in the beam energy scan (BES) program. In this article, we examine the collision energy dependence of directed flow $v_1$ in fluid dynamical model descriptions of heavy ion collisions for $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=3-20$ GeV. The first step is to reproduce the existing predictions within pure fluid dynamical calculations. As a second step we investigate the influence of the order of the phase transition on the anisotropic flow within a state-of-the-art hybrid approach that describes other global observables reasonably well. We find that, in the hybrid approach, there seems to be no sensitivity of the directed flow on the equation of state and in particular on the existence of a first order phase transition. In addition, we explore more subtle sensitivities like e.g. the Cooper-Frye transition criterion and discuss how momentum conservation and the definition of the event plane affects the results. At this point, none of our calculations matches qualitatively the behavior of the STAR data, the values of the slopes are always larger than in the data.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Dileptons in a coarse-grained transport approach

We calculate dilepton spectra in heavy-ion collisions using a coarse-graining approach to the simulation of the created medium with the UrQMD transport model. This enables the use of dilepton-production rates evaluated in equilibrium quantum-field theory at finite temperatures and chemical potentials.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, contribution to the proceedings of "The 15th International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter" (SQM 2015), 06-11 July in Dubna, Russi