Particle-Production Mechanism in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

We discuss the production of particles in relativistic heavy-ion collisions through the mechanism of massive bremsstrahlung, in which massive mesons are emitted during rapid nucleon acceleration. This mechanism is described within the framework of classical hadrodynamics for extended nucleons, corresponding to nucleons of finite size interacting with massive meson fields. This new theory provides a natural covariant microscopic approach to relativistic heavy-ion collisions that includes automatically spacetime nonlocality and retardation, nonequilibrium phenomena, interactions among all nucleons, and particle production. Inclusion of the finite nucleon size cures the difficulties with preacceleration and runaway solutions that have plagued the classical theory of self-interacting point particles. For the soft reactions that dominate nucleon-nucleon collisions, a significant fraction of the incident center-of-mass energy is radiated through massive bremsstrahlung. In the present version of the theory, this radiated energy is in the form of neutral scalar ($\sigma$) and neutral vector ($\omega$) mesons, which subsequently decay primarily into pions with some photons also. Additional meson fields that are known to be important from nucleon-nucleon scattering experiments should be incorporated in the future, in which case the radiated energy would also contain isovector pseudoscalar ($\pi^+$, $\pi^-$, $\pi^0$), isovector scalar ($\delta^+$, $\delta^-$, $\delta^0$), isovector vector ($\rho^+$, $\rho^-$, $\rho^0$), and neutral pseudoscalar ($\eta$) mesons.