Excitation Functions of Compression and Collective Flow in Central Au+Au Reactions from Bevalac/Sis to AGS

Experiments at Brookhaven’s AGS have already revealed much interesting new physics during the last few years[1, 2, 3]. In the next few years several important experiments will be carried out at AGS to further study the properties of hot and dense hadronic matter, and to search for the signals for chiral symmetry restoration and/or Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP) formation. Among the proposed experiments, systematic studies of Au+Au reactions at several beam momenta between 2 and 12 GeV/c will be carried out by the E895 and E866 collaborations. These experiments are interesting and important as it has been predicted based on hydrodynamical models that the QGP phase transition may occur in heavy-ion collisions at energies between E lab /A= 2– GeV[4, 5, 6]Since one of the necessary conditions for forming the QGP is to form a sufficient large volume of hadronic matter in which the energy density is higher than the QGP critical density, we shall therefore first study the excitation function of compression. Furthermore, since compression will result in the collective flow in the expansion phase of the reaction, we shall also study the excitation functions of the transverse and radial flow.