Thermal description of particle production in Au-Au collisions at RHIC energies (STAR)

The hadron ratios measured in central Au-Au collisions are analysed by means of Hadron Resonance Gas (HRG) model over a wide range of nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energies, √sNN = 7.7–200 GeV as offered by the RHIC Beam Energy Scan I (BES-I) (STAR Collaboration). The temperature and baryon chemical potential are deduced from fits of experimental ratios to thermal model calculations assuming chemical equilibrium. We find that the resulting freeze-out parameters using single hard-core value and point-like constituents of HRG are identical. This implies that the excluded-volume comes up with no effect on the extracted parameters. We compare the results with other studies and with the lattice QCD calculations. Various freeze-out conditions are confronted with the resulting data set. The effect of including new resonances is also analysed. At vanishing chemical potential, a limiting temperature was estimated, Tlim = 158.5 ± 3 MeV. © 2015, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.