Gluon versus sea quark shadowing

We calculate the shadowing of sea quarks and gluons and show that the shadowing of gluons is not simply given by the sea quark shadowing, especially at small x. The calculations are done in the lab frame approach by using the generalized vector meson dominance model. Here the virtual photon turns into a hadronic fluctuation long before the nucleus. The subsequent coherent interaction with more than one nucleon in the nucleus leads to the depletion sigma(gamma*A )< A*sigma(gamma * N) known as shadowing. A comparison of the shadowing of quarks to E665 data for 40Ca and 207Pb shows good agreement

On the impossibility of temperature extraction from heavy ion induced particle spectra

Spectra of various particle species have been calculated with the Quantum Molecular Dynamics (QMD) model for very central collisions of Au+Au. They are compatible with the idea of a fully stopped thermal source which exhibits a transversal expansion besides the thermal distribution of an ideal gas. How- ever, the microscopic analyses of the local flow velocities and temperatures indicate much lower temperatures at densities associated with the freeze-out. The results express the overall impossibility of a model-independent determi- nation of nuclear temperatures from heavy ion spectral data, also at other energies (e.g. CERN) or for other species (i.e. pions, kaons, hyperons

Gluon- vs. sea quark-shadowing

We calculate the shadowing of sea quarks and gluons and show that the shadowing of gluons is not simply given by the sea quark shadowing, especially at small x. The calculations are done in the lab frame approach by using the generalized vector meson dominance model. Here the virtual photon turns into a hadronic fluctuation long before the nucleus. The subsequent coherent interaction with more than one nucleon in the nucleus leads to the depletion sigma(gamma* A) < A sigma( gamma*N) known as shadowing. A comparison of the shadowing of quarks to E665 data for 40Ca and 207Pb shows good agreement

Relativistic Hartree approach including both positive- and negative-energy bound states

We develop a relativistic model to describe the bound states of positive energy and negative energy in finite nuclei at the same time. Instead of searching for the negative-energy solution of the nucleon's Dirac equation, we solve the Dirac equations for the nucleon and the anti-nucleon simultaneously. The single-particle energies of negative-energy nucleons are obtained through changing the sign of the single-particle energies of positive-energy anti-nucleons. The contributions of the Dirac sea to the source terms of the meson fields are evaluated by means of the derivative expansion up to the leading derivative order for the one-meson loop and one-nucleon loop. After refitting the parameters of the model to the properties of spherical nuclei, the results of positive-energy sector are similar to that calculated within the commonly used relativistic mean field theory under the no-sea approximation. However, the bound levels of negative-energy nucleons vary drastically when the vacuum contributions are taken into account. It implies that the negative-energy spectra deserve a sensitive probe to the effective interactions in addition to the positive-energy spectra

Physics of high-energy heavy-ion collisions

This a review of the present status of heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies. The main goal of heavy-ion physics in this energy regime is to shed some light on the nuclear equation of state (EOS), hence we present the basic concept of the EOS in nuclear matter as well as of nuclear shock waves which provide the key mechanism for the compression of nuclear matter. The main part of this article is devoted to the models currently used for describing heavy-ion reactions theoretically and to the observables useful for extracting information about the EOS from experiments. A detailed discussion of the flow effects with a broad comparison with the avaible data is presented. The many-body aspects of such reactions are investigated via the multifragmentation break up of excited nuclear systems and a comparison of model calculations with the most recent multifragmentation experiments is presented

Collective sideward flow of nuclear matter in violent high-energy heavy-ion collisions

Angular and energy distributions of fragments emitted from fast nucleus-nucleus collisions (Ne--> U at 250, 400, and 800 MeV/N) are calculated with use of nuclear fluid dynamics. A characteristic dependence of the energy spectra and angular distributions on the impact parameter is predicted. The preferential sideward emission of reaction fragments observed in the calculation for nearly central collisions seems to be supported by recent experimental data

Comment to 'The Dependence of the anomalous J / psi suppression on the number of participant nucleons'

The recently published experimental dependence of the J/psi suppression pattern in Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN SPS on the energy of zero degree calorimeter EZDC are analyzed. It is found that the data obtained within the minimum bias analysis (using theoretical Drell-Yan ) are at variance with the previously published experimental dependence of the same quantity on the transversal energy of neutral hadrons ET . The discrepancy is related to the moderate centrality region: 100 << Np << 200 (Np is the number of nucleon participants). This could result from systematic experimental errors in the minimum bias sample. A possible source of the errors may be contamination of the minimum bias sample by o -target interactions. The data obtained within the standard analysis (using measured Drell-Yan multiplicity) are found to be much less sensitive to the contamination

Flow in conical shock waves : a signal for the deconfinement transition?

We investigate the hydrodynamical flow of nuclear matter in a conical-shock-wave scenario of a central, asymmetric heavy-ion collision. This work is motivated by a suggestion of Chapline and Granik that the creation of a deconfined phase of quarks and gluons behind the shock will appreciably increase the deflection angle of the matter flow. We employ several hadron matter equations of state recently suggested to solve the conical-shock-wave problem and compare the results with a calculation using the bag equation of state. We find that large differences in the deflection angle obtained in the rest frame of the shock vanish in the laboratory system. However, a signature for the deconfinement transition may be the transverse momentum of the matter flow, which is up to a factor of 2 larger for the quark-gluon plasma. Thus, an excitation function of the mean transverse momentum would show an increase at a certain bombarding energy, signaling the onset of the deconfinement transition

From the Dyson-Schwinger to the transport equation in the background field gauge of QCD.

The non-equilibrium quantum field dynamics is usually described in the closed-time-path formalism. The initial state correlations are introduced into the generating functional by non-local source terms. We propose a functional approach to the Dyson-Schwinger equation, which treats the non-local and local source terms in the same way. In this approach, the generating functional is formulated for the connected Green functions and one-particle-irreducible vertices. The great advantages of our approach over the widely used two-particle-irreducible method are that it is much simpler and that it is easy to implement the procedure in a computer program to automatically generate the Feynman diagrams for a given process. The method is then applied to a pure gluon plasma to derive the gauge-covariant transport equation from the Dyson-Schwinger equation in the background covariant gauge. We discuss the structure of the kinetic equation and show its relationship with the classical one. We derive the gauge-covariant collision part and present an approximation in the vicinity of equilibrium. The role of the non-local source kernel in the non-equilibrium system is discussed in the context of a free scalar field. PACS numbers: 12.38.Mh, 25.75.-q, 24.85.+p, 11.15.K