Rapidity losses in heavy-ion collisions from AGS to RHIC energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates how baryon transport, measured by rapidity loss, behaves across a range of heavy-ion collision energies from AGS to RHIC, revealing a saturation at high energies.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of the full projectile net-baryon distribution across energies, showing that rapidity loss saturates at high energies, indicating energy independence of baryon transport.

Findings

Rapidity loss stops increasing from SPS to RHIC energies.

Baryon transport does not strongly depend on energy at high energies.

Full projectile net-baryon distributions were reconstructed from experimental data.

Abstract

We study the rapidity losses in central heavy-ion collisions from AGS to RHIC energies with the mean rapidity determined from the projectile net-baryon distribution after collisions. The projectile net-baryon distribution in the full rapidity range was obtained by removing the target contribution phenomenologically at forward rapidity region from the experimental net-baryon measurements and taking into account the projectile contribution at backward rapidity region. Based on the full projectile net-baryon distributions, calculation results show that the rapidity loss stops increasing from the SPS top energy to RHIC energies, indicating that baryon transport does not depend strongly on energy at high energies.