A non-plasma approach to the soft dilepton production in hA and AA collisions

We propose a method of evaluating the soft dilepton production rate in hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energies based on summing the contributions from quark-antiquark systems (chains) created in individual hadron-nucleon interactions. The individual contributions are determined by using the square dependence of the soft dilepton production rate on hadron multiplicity predicted for hadron-hadron collisions by the soft-quark-annihilation model and observed recently in pp collisions at the CERN ISR. The possibility of additional contributions originating from the annihilation of quarks and antiquarks that belong to different chains is taken into account in a phenomenological way, which nevertheless enables to correlate different phenomena in soft dilepton production. More detailed predictions are given for proton-nucleus collisions at 200 GeV/c. (orig.)