Understanding of the freeze-out in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

I discuss the quantities and effects important for the freeze-out and outline a formalism for the description of continuous decoupling of particles from the fireball. Then I present a calculation of the scattering rates of pions at various temperatures and argue that it is important to take continuous particle decoupling into account when modelling the collision dynamics.

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures, Talk given at the 2nd Warsaw meeting on correlations and resonances, Oct. 15-18, 2003, Warsaw, Poland