Dynamical evolution of the spectator systems produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

In peripheral heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies, usually only parts of the colliding nuclei effectively interact with each other. In the overlapping zone, a fireball or quark-gluon plasma is produced. The excitation energy of the heavy remnant can range from a few tens to several hundreds of MeV, depending on the impact parameter. The decay of these excited spectators is investigated in this work for the first time within a dynamical approach based on the multi-dimensional stochastic Langevin equation. The potential of this exploratory work to understand the connection between electromagnetic fields generated by the heavy spectators and measured pion distributions is discussed.

Comments: 17 pages, 14 figures