A Modified Glauber Approximation and the Formation of Shock Waves in High-Energy Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

Coherent features in high energy heavy ion collisions are investigated from a microscopic viewpoint. A modified Glauber approximation which enables us to include the slowing down of the relative motion between the centers of masses of both nuclei is presented. The generation of the shock wave is shown to be suppressed by this slowing down effect. As an application inclusive nucleon spectra and the two-particle correlation are calculated in the case of Ne+U collision at 400 Me V! A. l ) (which are referred to as I hereafter) we investigated a possible microscopic mechanism for shock wave generation in high energy heavy ion collisions. The nuclear excitation induced by a nuclear collision was de­ scribed in terms of phonons. It was shown that as the collision proceeds phonons are coherently excited and show a characteristic feature of the shock wave. In this treatment the action of the projectile on the target was replaced by that of a potential moving with a constant velocity. We may construct this potential by superposing the nucleonic potential between projectile nucleons and the target ones with amplitudes of nucleonic states in both nuclei. To treat both systems equally from a microscopic viewpoint, one of the authors (M.I) proposed a formalism which is essentially an application of the Glauber approximation to the process. 2 ) The assembly of nucleons in the projectile nucleus was assumed to move in a group during the collision and the Glauber approximation was applied to the relative motion between the centers of masses of the projectile and the target nucleus. In this treatment the deceleration of the relative motion due to the nuclear excitation was not taken into account. In this paper we extend the Glauber approximation so as to take into account the slowing down of the relative motion. In § 2 the formulation of the modified Glauber approximation is presented.