PION PRODUCTION AS A PROBE OF THE NUCLEAR MATTER EQUATION OF STATE

Abstract It is shown that thermal and chemical equilibrium are approached during the high density stage in central nucleus-nucleus collisions and that the yield of produced pions is determined at that time. A chemical model with Rankine-Hugoniot compression is used to extract a nuclear matter equation of state from the observed pion yield assuming a partition of the internal energy per nucleon into thermal and compressional energy fractions, with only the former part contributing to particle production.