Semihard Interactions in Nuclear Collisions Based on a Unified Approach to High Energy Scattering

Abstract

Our ultimate goal is the construction of a model for interactions of two nuclei in the energy range between several tens of GeV up to several TeV per nucleon in the centre-of-mass system. Such nuclear collisions are very complex, being composed of many components, and therefore some strategy is needed to construct a reliable model. The central point of our approach is the hypothesis, that the behavior of high energy interactions is universal (universality hypothesis). So, for example, the hadronization of partons in nuclear interactions follows the same rules as the one in electron-positron annihilation; the radiation of off-shell partons in nuclear collisions is based on the same principles as the one in deep inelastic scattering. We construct a model for nuclear interactions in a modular fashion. The individual modules, based on the universality hypothesis, are identified as building blocks for more elementary interactions (like e^+ e^-, lepton-proton), and can therefore be studied in a much simpler context. With these building blocks under control, we can provide a quite reliable model for nucleus-nucleus scattering, providing in particular very useful tests for the complicated numerical procedures using Monte Carlo techniques.