Stopping power of large nuclei at RHIC

Most of today's calculations and model estimates for heavy ion collisions at extremely high energy have been performed assuming the Bjorken picture. Baryons concentrated at projectile and target rapidity separated by a large region which is totally baryon-free (in local and momentum space), i.e. the nuclei are totally transparent. The region between them is filled by the color fields which materialize, developing a plateau in the mesons' rapidity distribution. This scenarios is supported experimentally for pp - and for pp-bar - collisions at collider energies. It is the aim of the present work to examine whether this remains true also for the collisions of large nuclei. We study the stopping behaviour of baryonic matter in nucleus nucleus collisions for energies up to √s = 200 AGeV Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Brookhaven (RHIC), using Relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics (RQMD). RQMD has been successfully applied for the description of the collisions of heavy nuclei at Brookhaven AGS and CERN 400 GeV Proton Synchrotron (SPS) energies. It combines a Lorentz-invariant solution of the microscopic N-body problem with the most important quantum effects like stochastic scattering, particle production and decay. (author)