Radial, sideward and elliptic flow at AGS energies

Abstract

We study the baryon transverse in-plane (sideward) and elliptic flow from SIS to AGS energies for AuAu collisions in a relativistic dynamical simulation model that includes all baryon resonances up to a mass of 2 GeV as well as string degrees of freedom for the higher mass continuum. There are two factors which dominantly determine the baryon flow at these energies: the momentum dependence of the scalar and vector potentials and the resonance-string degrees of freedom. We fix the explicit momentum dependence of the nucleon-meson couplings of NL3(hard) equation of state (EoS) by the nucleon optical potential up to 1 GeV of kinetic energy. We simultaneously reproduce the sideward flow, the elliptic flow and the radial transverse mass distribution of protons data at AGS energies. In order to study the sensitivity of different mean-field EoS, we use NL2(soft) and NL23(medium) along with NL3(hard) momenta-dependent mean-field EoS. We find that to describe data on both sideward and elliptic flow, NL3 model is better at 2 A·GeV, while NL23 model is at 4–8 A·GeV.