Colour rope model for extreme relativistic heavy ion collisions

We have constructed a cooperative model for the description of meson production in extreme relativistic heavy ion collisions. Two effects are essentially considered: (I) the simultaneous production of many colour sources due to the primary interactions leads to cooperative, i.e. the non-additive, formation of a multistring object, called a rope; (II) the decay of this rope depends - through the Schwinger mechanism - on its initial colour charge. A scaling behavior with respect to the masses of the heavy ions is discussed. The lifetime of the ropes is found to be practically no longer for the A + A than for the p + p case. (orig.)