High Energy Nuclear Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

In the last decade more and more interest has been focussed on the problem of how to deduce the nuclear matter equation of state from experimental data, especially from heavy ion collisions. One has looked not only at densities around saturation to determine the stiffness of the equation of state, but recently also at very high densities (energies) in order to find signals for a phase transition to the quark gluon plasma. One problem is, however, the uncertainty in the bulk properties and the minor significance of the compression constant at ground state on the high density behaviour of the nuclear equation of state. Therefore it is a problem to deduce the equation of state from the ground state properties or vice versa.On the other hand the key mechanism for high compression and heating of nuclear matter in the laboratory was unambiguously established with the discovery of compression shocks in nuclear matter, which had been predicted long ago. Our approach is therefore to study the behaviour of highly excited and more or less compressed nuclear matter by using the successful hydrodynamical model and extend it in order to describe ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions.Results are presented for collisions of heavy ions at high energies up to 200 GeV in full space and time (3 + 1 dimension) and compared to experimental data.