Forward protons and nuclear transparency in relativistic heavy-ion interactions

The relativistic cascade code ARC is applied to data from the experiment E814 covering projectile rapidities in Si+Pb collisions at 14.6 GeV/c per nucleon. The result is a quantitative theoretical description of the entire range of the experimental rapidity spectrum, as well as of the number and transverse energy dependence of ''punchthrough'' protons. This plus additional detailed comparisions of transverse mass distributions strongly suggest the cascade approach can be highly useful for understanding energetic ion collisions