No Arabic abstract
Entropy production in the compression stage of heavy ion collisions is discussed within three distinct macroscopic models (i.e. generalized RHTA, geometrical overlap model and three-fluid hydrodynamics). We find that within these models sim 80% or more of the experimentally observed final-state entropy is created in the early stage. It is thus likely followed by a nearly isentropic expansion. We employ an equation of state with a first-order phase transition. For low net baryon density, the entropy density exhibits a jump at the phase boundary. However, the excitation function of the specific entropy per net baryon, S/A, does not reflect this jump. This is due to the fact that for final states (of the compression) in the mixed phase, the baryon density rho_B increases with sqrt{s}, but not the temperature T. Calculations within the three-fluid model show that a large fraction of the entropy is produced by nuclear shockwaves in the projectile and target. With increasing beam energy, this fraction of S/A decreases. At sqrt{s}=20 AGeV it is on the order of the entropy of the newly produced particles around midrapidity. Hadron ratios are calculated for the entropy values produced initially at beam energies from 2 to 200 AGeV.
We study the evolution of the quark-gluon composition of the plasma created in ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions (uRHICs) employing a partonic transport theory that includes both elastic and inelastic collisions plus a mean fields dynamics associated to the widely used quasi-particle model. The latter, able to describe lattice QCD thermodynamics, implies a chemical equilibrium ratio between quarks and gluons strongly increasing as $Trightarrow T_c$, the phase transition temperature. Accordingly we see in realistic simulations of uRHICs a rapid evolution from a gluon dominated initial state to a quark dominated plasma close to $T_c$. The quark to gluon ratio can be modified by about a factor of $sim 20$ in the bulk of the system and appears to be large also in the high $p_T$ region. We discuss how this aspect, often overflown, can be important for a quantitative study of several key issues in the QGP physics: shear viscosity, jet quenching, quarkonia suppression. Furthermore a bulk plasma made by more than $80%$ of quarks plus antiquarks provides a theoretical basis for hadronization via quark coalescence.
We investigate the relativistic equation of state of hadronic matter and quark-gluon plasma at finite temperature and baryon density in the framework of the non-extensive statistical mechanics, characterized by power-law quantum distributions. We impose the Gibbs conditions on the global conservation of baryon number, electric charge and strangeness number. For the hadronic phase, we study an extended relativistic mean-field theoretical model with the inclusion of strange particles (hyperons and mesons). For the quark sector, we employ an extended MIT-Bag model. In this context we focus on the relevance of non-extensive effects in the presence of strange matter.
We describe the quark gluon plasma (QGP) as a thermalized quark-gluon system, the thermalized QGP phase of QCD. The hadronization of the thermalized QGP phase is given in a way resembling a coalescence model with correlated quarks and anti-quarks. The input parameters of the approach are the spatial volumes of the hadronization. We introduce three dimensionless parameters C_M, C_B and C_bar{B} related to the spatial volumes of the production of low-lying mesons (M), baryons (B) and antibaryons (bar{B}). We show that at the temperature T= 175 MeV our predictions for the ratios of multiplicities agree good with the presently available set of hadron ratios measured for various experiments given by NA44, NA49, NA50 and WA97 Collaborations on Pb+Pb collisions at 158 GeV/nucleon, NA35 Collaboration on S+S collisions and NA38 Collaboration on O+U and S+U collisions at 200 GeV/nucleon.
Averaged over ensemble of initial conditions kinetic transport equations of weakly coupled systems of quarks and gluons are derived. These equations account for the correlators of fluctuations of particles and classical gluon fields. The isotropization of particle momenta by field fluctuations at the early prethermal stage of matter evolution in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions is discussed. Our results can be useful for understanding under what conditions isotropization of the quark-gluon plasma in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions can be reached within phenomenologically observed time scales.
The sign change of the slope of the directed flow of baryons has been predicted as a signal for a first order phase transition within fluid dynamical calculations. Recently, the directed flow of identified particles has been measured by the STAR collaboration in the beam energy scan (BES) program. In this article, we examine the collision energy dependence of directed flow $v_1$ in fluid dynamical model descriptions of heavy ion collisions for $sqrt{s_{NN}}=3-20$ GeV. The first step is to reproduce the existing predictions within pure fluid dynamical calculations. As a second step we investigate the influence of the order of the phase transition on the anisotropic flow within a state-of-the-art hybrid approach that describes other global observables reasonably well. We find that, in the hybrid approach, there seems to be no sensitivity of the directed flow on the equation of state and in particular on the existence of a first order phase transition. In addition, we explore more subtle sensitivities like e.g. the Cooper-Frye transition criterion and discuss how momentum conservation and the definition of the event plane affects the results. At this point, none of our calculations matches qualitatively the behavior of the STAR data, the values of the slopes are always larger than in the data.