Some soft aspects of relativistic ion collisions

Abstract

Concepts of wounded nucleon and quark participants have been used for years to parametrize and/or to explain many features of high energy nuclear collisions. Some results illustrating successes and failures of these two approaches are presented, including the latest developments. In particular, results on identified particle production from nuclear collisions measured by the NA49 experiment at the CERN-SPS are shown. The study has been done for both the nucleon and the constituent quark frameworks using the nuclear overlap model. In addition, some preliminary observations concerning the behavior of pT spectra at forward rapidities, expressed in terms of the nuclear modification factor, for hadron-nucleus collisions at the SPS energy are also presented. These results are in relevance to RHIC results for deuteron-gold collisions often interpreted as a manifestation of saturation and/or color glass condensate.