Cascade for relativistic nucleus collisions

Abstract

A relativistic hadronic cascade is used to simulate collisions of Si on Au at 14.6 GeV/c per nucleon. When proper account is taken of resonances produced in elemental hadron-hadron collisions this cascade quantitatively describes most published E802 data from the BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotn including the problematic proton transverse mass distributions. No medium effects seem required to explain the apparent enhancement of strangeness production nor any other features of the data.