Thermal hadron production in Si-Au collisions

Abstract

The most abundantly produced hadron species in $Si\!-\!Au$ collisions at the BNL-AGS (nucleons, pions, kaons, antikaons and hyperons) are shown to be in accord with emission from a thermal resonance gas source of temperature $T\simeq 110$ MeV and baryochemical potential $μ_B \simeq 540$ MeV, corresponding to about 1/3 standard nuclear density. Our analysis takes the isopin asymmetry of the initial state fully into account.

10 pages LaTeX2e, 3 figures in Postscript format