Geometry, hydrodynamics and local equilibrium in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Through high energy central collision of heavy ions, states of high density and temperature are expected to be formed. The authors start from a relativistic mean field equation of state for nuclear matter. Geometrical concepts from the usual firestreak model together with hydrodynamic calculation (Rankine-Hugoniotequation) are used to obtain distributions of temperature and density at the end of the compression phase of the overlapping part of the two nuclei. These distributions for Ne on Ne at different beam energies show that the finite size of the nuclei prevents a global thermodynamic equilibrium from being achieved