0000000000211226
AUTHOR
Madappa Prakash
e+e- yields in Pb+Au collisions at 158 AGeV/c: Assessment of baryonic contributions
Using a hydrodynamic approach to describe Pb+Au collisions at 158 AGeV/c, we analyze e+e- yields from matter containing baryons in addition to mesons. We employ e+e- production rates from two independent calculations, which differ both in their input physics and in their absolute magnitudes, especially in the mass range where significant enhancements over expected backgrounds exist in the CERES data. Although the presence of baryons leads to significant enhancement of e+e- emission relative to that from mesons-only matter, the calculated results fall below the data in the range 400 < M_ee/MeV < 600, by a factor of 2-3. Since the calculated e+e- spectra are relatively insensitive to th…
Effects of Strong and Electromagnetic Correlations on Neutrino Interactions in Dense Matter
An extensive study of the effects of correlations on both charged and neutral current weak interaction rates in dense matter is performed. Both strong and electromagnetic correlations are considered.The propagation of particle-hole interactions in the medium plays an important role in determining the neutrino mean free paths. The effects due to Pauli-Blocking and density, spin, and isospin correlations in the medium significantly reduce the neutrino cross sections. Due to the lack of experimental information at high density, these correlations are necessarily model dependent. For example, spin correlations in nonrelativistic models are found to lead to larger suppressions of neutrino cross …
Kaon condensation in proto-neutron star matter
We study the equation of state (EOS) of kaon-condensed matter including the effects of temperature and trapped neutrinos. It is found that the order of the phase transition to a kaon-condensed phase, and whether or not Gibbs' rules for phase equilibrium can be satisfied in the case of a first order transition, depend sensitively on the choice of the kaon-nucleon interaction. The main effect of finite temperature, for any value of the lepton fraction, is to mute the effects of a first order transition, so that the thermodynamics becomes similar to that of a second order transition. Above a critical temperature, found to be at least 30--60 MeV depending upon the interaction, the first order t…
Evolution of Proto-Neutron stars with kaon condensates
We present simulations of the evolution of a proto-neutron star in which kaon-condensed matter might exist, including the effects of finite temperature and trapped neutrinos. The phase transition from pure nucleonic matter to the kaon condensate phase is described using Gibbs' rules for phase equilibrium, which permit the existence of a mixed phase. A general property of neutron stars containing kaon condensates, as well as other forms of strangeness, is that the maximum mass for cold, neutrino-free matter can be less than the maximum mass for matter containing trapped neutrinos or which has a finite entropy. A proto-neutron star formed with a baryon mass exceeding that of the maximum mass …
Hydrodynamical Description of 200 A GeV/c S+Au Collisions: Hadron and Electromagnetic Spectra
We study relativistic S+Au collisions at 200 A GeV/c using a hydrodynamical approach. We test various equations of state (EOSs), which are used to describe the strongly interacting matter at densities attainable in the CERN-SPS heavy ion experiments. For each EOS, suitable initial conditions can be determined to reproduce the experimental hadron spectra; this emphasizes the ambiguity between the initial conditions and the EOS in such an approach. Simultaneously, we calculate the resulting thermal photon and dielectron spectra, and compare with experiments. If one allows the excitation of resonance states with increasing temperature, the electro-magnetic signals from scenarios with and witho…
Baryonic contributions to e+e- yields in a hydrodynamic model of Pb+Au collisions at the SPS
We analyze e+e- yields from matter containing baryons in addition to mesons using a hydrodynamic approach to describe Pb+Au collisions at 158 A GeV/c. We use two distinctly different e+e- production rates to provide contrast. Although the presence of baryons leads to significant enhancement of e+e- emission relative to that from mesons-only matter, the calculated results fall below the data in the range 400 < M/MeV < 600. The calculated results are, however, only 1.3-1.5 standard deviations below the data, which may not be statistically significant.