Description of the RHIC p⊥ spectra in a thermal model with expansion -: art. no. 272302

The assumption of simultaneous chemical and thermal freeze-outs of the hadron gas leads to a surprisingly accurate, albeit entirely conventional explanation of the recently measured RHIC p(perpendicular to) spectra. The original thermal spectra are supplied with secondaries from cascade decays of all resonances, and subsequently folded with a suitably parametrized expansion involving longitudinal and transverse flow. The predictions of this thermal approach, with various parametrizations for the expansion, are in a striking quantitative agreement with the data in the whole available range of 0 less than or equal to p(perpendicular to) less than or equal to 3.5 GeV.