PI-N CORRELATIONS PROBE THE NUCLEAR-EQUATION OF STATE IN RELATIVISTIC HEAVY-ION COLLISIONS

We investigate the sensitivity of pionic bounce-off and squeeze-out on the density and momentum dependence of the real part of the nucleon optical potential. For the in-plane pion bounce-off we find a strong sensitivity on both the density and momentum dependence whereas the out-of-plane pion squeeze-out shows a strong sensitivity only towards the momentum dependence but little sensitivity towards the density dependence. We observe strong differences between calculations including the nucleon optical potential and CASCADE calculations. The question of validity of the CASCADE approach in relativistic heavy-ion collisions can be resolved experimentally on the basis of the predicted pion nucleon correlations. © 1995 The American Physical Society.