Spectra of produced particles at CERN SPS heavy-ion collisions from a parton-cascade model

Abstract

We evaluate the spectra of produced particles (pions, kaons, antiprotons) from partonic cascades which may develop in the wake of heavy-ion collisions at CERN SPS energies and which may hadronize by formation of clusters which decay into hadrons. Using the experimental data obtained by NA35 and NA44 collaborations for S+S and Pb+Pb collisions, we conclude that the Monte Carlo implementation of the recently developed parton-cascade/cluster-hadronization model provides a reasonable description of the distributions of the particles produced in such collisions. While the rapidity distribution of the mid-rapidity protons is described reasonably well, their transverse momentum distribution falls too rapidly compared to the experimental values, implying a significant effect of final state scattering among the produced hadrons neglected so far.

13 pages including 8 postscript figures