McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics
Informal Pizza Seminar

Dileptons and photons from coarse-grained microscopic dynamics and from hydrodynamics compared to experimental data

Joe Kapusta

University of Minnesota

Radiation of dileptons and photons from high energy nuclear collisions provides information on the space-time evolution of the hot dense matter produced in these collisions. We compute this radiation using relativistic hydrodynamics and a coarse-grained version of the microscopic event generator UrQMD, both of which provide a good description of the hadron spectra. Comparisons are made to data on central Pb-Pb and Pb-Au collisions taken at the CERN SPS at a beam energy of 158 A GeV. Both hydrodynamics and UrQMD provide very good descriptions of the photon transverse momentum spectrum measured between 1 and 4 GeV, but slightly underestimate the low mass spectrum of electron-positron pairs, even with greatly broadened rho and omega vector mesons.

Tuesday, March 19th 2002, 12:00
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, room 326