Isospin equilibration in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
A. Hombach - W. Cassing - U. Mosel
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Giessen, D-35392 Giessen, Germany
Received: 23 September 1998 / Revised version: 3 December 1998 Communicated by V. Metag
Abstract
We study the mixing and the
kinetic equilibration of projectile and target nucleons
in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
in the energy regime between 150 AMeV and 2 AGeV
in a coupled-channel BUU (CBUU) approach.
We find that equilibrium in the
projectile-target degrees of freedom is in general
not reached even for large systems at low energy where elastic
nucleon-nucleon collisions dominate. Inelastic nucleon excitations
are more favorable for equilibration and their relative abundance
increases both with energy and mass.
Experimentally, the projectile/target admixture can be
determined by measuring the degree of isospin equilibration
in isospin asymmetric nuclear collisions.
For one of the most promising systems currently under
investigation, 
, we investigate
the influence of the equation of state and the inelastic in-medium
cross section.
PACS
25.75.+r Relativistic heavy-ion collisions
Copyright Springer-Verlag
