Cascade simulation of ultrarelativistic collisions

1988

The dynamics of hot matter produced in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions is studied with a cascade simulation. We model the putative quark-gluon plasma with independent globs of high-density matter. The hadronic phase is treated by explicit tracking of pion coordinates. We find that the pions make 0--2 collisions with globs and 1--3 collisions with other pions, under conditions expected for heavy ions at collider energies. The entropy increases by about 20% during the phase transition. The transverse momentum in the final state is almost entirely due to the momentum with which pions are emitted from the globs, except at extremely high densities where the hydrodynamic expansion of the p…