Remnants of initial anisotropic high energy density domains in nucleus-nucleus collisions

Anisotropic high energy density domains may be formed at early stages of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions, e.g., due to phase transition dynamics or nonequilibrium phenomena like (mini)jets. Here we investigate hadronic observables resulting from an initially created anisotropic high energy density domain. Based on our studies using a transport model we find that the initial anisotropies are reflected in the freeze-out multiplicity distribution of both pions and kaons due to secondary hadronic rescattering. The anisotropy appears to be stronger for particles at high transverse momenta. The overall kaon multiplicity increases with large fluctuations of local energy densities, while no change has been found in the pion multiplicity. copyright 1999 The American Physical Society