Hadronic degrees of freedom in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions at AGS energies are studied by using an new developed hadronic cascade model, HANDEL which includes a few hadronic degrees of freedom. The spectra of hadron-hadron, hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus reactions at AGS energies are well reproduced by HANDEL. It is confirmed that the infinite matter described by HANDEL has particle fractions which are expected from grand canonical ensemble. When we compare the thermal evolution of Au+Au collision from HANDEL with the result from JAM which has larger hadronic degree of freedoms, we find both models give similar evolution of temperature, against naive expectation. We argue that this results can be interpretated if the particles in formation time works as the additional effective hadronic degrees of freedom. (author)