REVIEW OF RAPIDITY DENSITY DISTRIBUTIONS IN HEAVY-ION INDUCED INTERACTIONS AT RELATIVISTIC ENERGIES

Abstract

Violent interactions among colliding nuclei ultimately provide the suitable conditions for creating new and hitherto unexplored phenomena like color rope and quark-gluon plasma formation. The systemmatics achieved so far in pseudorapidity and density distributions of charged particles emitted from relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions is reviewed and comparisons to model predictions are made. Data from both emulsion and counter experiments are utilized and the dependence of the angular spectra on projectile energy, centrality measured by means of forward charge or enegy flow, and on the projectile/target masses are reported. For a few central events, energy densities of the hot overlap zone are estimated to be beyond onset of deconfinement phase transition.