Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at Highest Energies

Abstract

The microscopic phasespace approach URQMD is used to investigate the stopping power and particle production in heavy systems at SPS and RHIC energies. This framework bridges with one model consistently the entire available range of energies from below SIS to CERN, even for the heaviest system Pb+Pb. URQMD is a hadronic transport model based on the propagation of hadrons on classical trajectories in the framework of Lorentz-invariant dynamics. It includes secondary interactions e.g. annihilation of produced mesons leading to the formation of resonances and the excitation of strings. The collision term contains 50 different baryon species (including nucleon, delta and hyperon resonances with masses up to 2 GeV) and 25 different meson species (including strange meson resonances), which are supplemented by their corresponding antiparticle and all isospin-projected states. Within this approach we find no gap in the baryon rapidity distribution even at RHIC. For CERN (SPS) energies URQMD shows a pile up of baryons and a supression of multi-nucleon clusters (e.g. He) at midrapidity.