Isospin equilibration in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We study the mixing and the kinetic equilibration of projectile and target nucleons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions in the energy regime between 150~AMeV and 2~AGeV in a coupled-channel BUU (CBUU) approach. We find that equilibrium in the projectile-target degrees of freedom is in general not reached even for large systems at low energy where elastic nucleon-nucleon collisions dominate. Inelastic nucleon excitations are more favorable for equilibration and their relative abundance increases both with energy and mass. Experimentally, the projectile/target admixture can be determined by measuring the degree of isospin equilibration in isospin asymmetric nuclear collisions. For one of the most promising systems currently under investigation, ${}^{96}_{44}{\rm Ru}+{}^{96}_{40}{\rm Zr}$, we investigate the influence of the equation of state and the inelastic in-medium cross section.