Limiting fragmentation of chemical potentials in heavy ion collisions

Abstract

Thermal models have been used to successfully describe the hadron yields from heavy ion collisions at a variety of energies. For root(S)<17 GeV this has usually been done using yields integrated over 4pi but at the higher energies available at RHIC, yields measured at central rapidity have been used. Recent BRAHMS data allows us to test whether thermal models can be generalized to describe the rapidity dependence of particle ratios. We have used the THERMUS package to fit BRAHMS data for the 5% most central Au+Au collisions for several rapidities at root(S) = 62 and 200 GeV. We have found a relationship between the strange and light quark chemical potentials, muS = 0.21 +-0.01muB. Using this relation we are able to describe the energy dependence of Lambda, Xsi and Omega ratios from other experiments. We also find that the chemical potentials are consistent with limiting fragmentation.