Kinetic Freeze-out and Radial Flow in 11.6 A GeV Au+Au Collisions

Abstract

We study the kinetic freeze-out conditions of hadrons in Au+Au collisions at 11.6 A GeV/c using different parametrizations of an expanding thermal fireball. We take into account the available double differential momentum spectra of a variety of particle species, covering a large fraction of the total momentum space. The overall fit to the data is very good and indicates a relatively low kinetic freeze-out temperature of about 90 MeV with an average transverse expansion velocity at midrapidity of about 0.5 c.

Comments: 5 pages ReVTeX, incl. 3 figures and 2 tables. Revised version with improved discussion of model and added references. Accepted by Phys. Lett. B