Particle spectra and hydro-inspired models.pdf

a r X i v : n u c l - t h / 0 5 0 9 0 3 9 v 3 2 9 N o v 2 0 0 5 Particle spectra and hydro-inspired models Wojciech Florkowski ? Institute of Physics, S?wie?tokrzyska Academy ul. S?wie?tokrzyska 15, 25-406 Kielce, Poland and H. Niewodniczan?ski Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences ul. Radzikowskiego 152, 31-543 Krako?w, Poland Several popular parameterizations of the freeze-out conditions in ultra-relativistic heavy- ion collisions are shortly reviewed. The common features of the models, responsible for the successful description of hadronic observables, are outlined. 1. INTRODUCTION In this talk I present several models which turned out to be quite successful in repro- ducing the experimentally measured hadron spectra in nucleus-nucleus collisions. The discussed models use concepts borrowed from relativistic hydrodynamics but they do not include the complete time evolution of the system. For this reason, they may be called hydro-inspired (freeze-out) models. The measured particle spectra reflect properties of matter at the stage when particles stop to interact. This moment is called the kinetic (thermal) freeze-out. Hydro-inspired models help us to verify the idea that matter, just before the kinetic freeze-out, is locally thermalized and exhibits collective behavior, such as the transverse and longitudinal expansion. If this is really the case, i.e., if the hydro- inspired models describe the data well, we may infer the thermodynamic properties of matter at freeze-out, such as the values of the temperature and flow, and request that the advanced hydrodynamic models reproduce this configuration. In my opinion, the real aim of the freeze-out models is to form a simple link between sophisticated hydrodynamic calculations [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] describing the full time evo- lution of matter (with the inclusion of the phase transition) and the rich bulk of the experimental data describing soft phenomena. This is an appealing idea, however, one enc