Entropy of a system formed in the collision of heavy ions

In the framework of the cascade model, we study the evolution of the entropy of a system formed in the collision of heavy ions. The method of calculating the entropy is based on a smoothing of the momentum distribution function by means of introducing a temperature field. It is shown that the resulting entropy per nucleon is very sensitive to the specific partitioning of phase space into cells in the free-expansion phase of the reaction. From comparison with experiment it is found that the cascade calculations do not show a preference for a particular model calculation of the entropy, but predict that the entropy is smaller than the values following from equilibrium statistics