Saturation of Transverse Energy per Charged Hadron and Freeze-Out Criteria in Heavy-Ion Collisions

For beam energies from SPS to RHIC, the transverse energy per charged particle, $E_T/N_{\textrm{ch}}$, saturates at a value of approximately 0.8 GeV. A direct connection between this value and the freeze-out criterium $E/N \approx 1$ GeV for the primordial energy and particle number in the hadronic resonance gas model is established.