Investigation of resonance lifetimes and mean free paths in a transport approach

Hadronic transport approaches are used to describe the dynamical evolution of heavy-ion reactions at low beam energies (up to FAIR/RHIC/SPS energies). In this work, we investigate specific properties of a time step based simulation of heavy-ion collisions in a microscopic transport model (SMASH). First, the actual lifetimes of resonances in the simulation are compared to theoretical expectations. Furthermore, the dependence of scattering rates on the choice of the time step size is analyzed. The time steps need to be smaller than the mean free path of the particles, which is calculated via the local density and individual scattering cross section. Based on these findings an algorithm to determine the optimal time step size is developed.