Kinetic Freeze-out Research Articles

Resonances at RHIC

In this report, we discuss the measurement of the hadronic decay modes of resonances in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, emphasizing on RHIC results. The study of resonances can provide: (1) the yield and spectra of more particles with different properties to study whether the system is in thermal equilibrium; (2) an independent probe of the time evolution of the source from chemical to kinetic freeze-out and detailed information on hadronic interaction at later stage; (3) the study of medium effects at a late stage of the collisions; (4) a measurement of flavour and baryon/meson dependence of particle production at intermediate pT (>2 GeV/c).

Transverse spectra of hadrons at RHIC

We present results on spectra of pions, kaons and (anti)protons from a study of heavy ion collisions using the perturbative QCD + saturation model to calculate the production of initial (transverse) energy and baryon number followed by a hydrodynamic description of the expansion of produced matter. In particular, we study how the hadron spectra and multiplicities depend on the decoupling temperature T dec when the low temperature phase contains all hadrons and and hadron resonances with mass below 2 GeV. We show that the spectra and multiplicities of pions, kaons and (anti)protons measured at RHIC in central Au+Au collisions with √ s = 130GeV can be obtained with a single decoupling temperature 150...160 MeV, common for both the chemical and the kinetic freeze-out.

Probing hadronization and freeze-out with multiple strange hadrons and strange resonances

I)The production of multiple strange baryons in pp interactions is studied. Here on can directly probe the microscopic decay of color flux tubes, allowing to differentiate between different string models and a statistical description of the hadronization. II)To analyse the different stages of a heavy ion collision the time evolution of the elastic and inelastic collision rates in central Pb+Pb interactions are studied. The microscopic simulation supports the idea of separated phases (non-equilibrium -> chemical freeze-out -> kinetic freeze-out) in the evolution of the system. The spectra and abundances of $\Lambda(1520)$, $K^0(892)$ and other resonances are used to study the break-up dynamics of the source between chemical and thermal freeze-out.

Flow effects on the freeze-out phase-space density in heavy-ion collisions

The strong longitudinal expansion of the reaction zone formed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is found to significantly reduce the spatially averaged pion phase-space density, compared to naive estimates based on thermal distributions. This has important implications for data interpretation and leads to larger values for the extracted pion chemical potential at kinetic freeze-out.

Antinucleus production at RHIC

Light antinuclei may be formed in relativistic heavy ion collisions via final state coalescence of antinucleons. The yields of antinuclei are sensitive to primordial antinucleon production, the volume of the system at kinetic freeze-out, and space-momentum correlations among antinucleons at freeze-out. We report here preliminary STAR results on antideuteron and antihelion production in 130A GeV Au+Au collisions. These results are examined in a coalescence framework to elucidate the space-time structure of the antinucleon source.

Direct emission of multiple strange baryons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions from the phase boundary

We discuss a model for the space-time evolution of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions which employs relativistic hydrodynamics within one region of the forward light-cone, and microscopic transport theory (i.e. UrQMD) in the complement. Our initial condition consists of a quark-gluon plasma which expands hydrodynamically and hadronizes. After hadronization the solution eventually changes from expansion in local equilibrium to free streaming, as determined selfconsistently by the interaction rates between the hadrons and the local expansion rate. We show that in such a scenario the inverse slopes of the m T -spectra of multiple strange baryons ( Ξ, Ω) are practically unaffected by the purely hadronic stage of the reaction, while the flow of p's and Λ's increases. Moreover, we find that the rather “soft” transverse expansion at RHIC energies (due to a first-order phase transition) is not washed out by strong rescattering in the hadronic stage. The earlier kinetic freeze-out as compared to SPS-energies results in similar inverse slopes (of the m T -spectra of the hadrons in the final state) at RHIC and SPS energies.

On model calculations of neutron widths and strength functions: Carl Shakin, Department of Physics and Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts

In high-energy collisions, the spatio-temporal size of the particle production region can be measured using the Bose–Einstein correlations of identical bosons at low relative momentum. The source radii are typically extracted using two-pion correlations, and characterize the system at the last stage of interaction, called kinetic freeze-out. In low-multiplicity collisions, unlike in high-multiplicity collisions, two-pion correlations are substantially altered by background correlations, e.g. mini-jets. Such correlations can be suppressed using three-pion cumulant correlations. We present the first measurements of the size of the system at freeze-out extracted from three-pion cumulant correlations in pp, p–Pb and Pb–Pb collisions at the LHC with ALICE. At similar multiplicity, the invariant radii extracted in p–Pb collisions are found to be 5–15% larger than those in pp, while those in Pb–Pb are 35–55% larger than those in p–Pb. Our measurements disfavor models which incorporate substantially stronger collective expansion in p–Pb as compared to pp collisions at similar multiplicity.