Hadronic freeze-out following a first order hadronization phase transition in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions -: art. no. 021902

We analyze the hadronic freeze-out in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in a transport approach that combines hydrodynamics for the early, dense, deconfined stage of the reaction with a microscopic nonequilibrium model for the later hadronic stage at which the hydrodynamic equilibrium assumptions are not valid. With this ansatz we are able to self-consistently calculate the freeze-out of the system and determine space-time hypersurfaces for individual hadron species. The space-time domains of the freeze-out for several hadron species are found to be actually four dimensional, and differ drastically for the individual hadrons species. Freeze-out radii distributions are similar in width for most hadron species, even though the Omega(-) is found to be emitted rather close to the phase boundary and shows the smallest freeze-out radii and times among all baryon species. The total Lifetime of the system does not change by more than 10% when going from CERN Super Proton Synchrotron to RHIC energies. [S0556-2813(99)50308-7].