We present measurements of bulk properties of the matter produced in Au+Au collisions at √ sNN = 7.7, 11.5, 19.6, 27, and 39 GeV using identified hadrons (π ± , K ± , p andp) from the STAR experiment in the Beam Energy Scan (BES) Program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Midrapidity (|y| <0.1) results for multiplicity densities dN/dy, average transverse momenta pT and particle ratios are presented. The chemical and kinetic freeze-out dynamics at these energies are discussed and presented as a function of collision centrality and energy. These results constitute the systematic measurements of bulk properties of matter formed in heavy-ion collisions over a broad range of energy (or baryon chemical potential) at RHIC.

Simulations by transport codes are indispensable to extract valuable physical information from heavy-ion collisions. In order to understand the origins of discrepancies among different widely used transport codes, we compare 15 such codes under controlled conditions of a system confined to a box with periodic boundary, initialized with Fermi-Dirac distributions at saturation density and temperatures of either 0 or 5 MeV. In such calculations, one is able to check separately the different ingredients of a transport code. In this second publication of the code evaluation project, we only consider the two-body collision term; i.e., we perform cascade calculations. When the Pauli blocking is artificially suppressed, the collision rates are found to be consistent for most codes (to within 1% or better) with analytical results, or completely controlled results of a basic cascade code. PHYSICAL REVIEW C 97, 034625 (2018) to reach that goal, it was necessary to eliminate correlations within the same pair of colliding particles that can be present depending on the adopted collision prescription. In calculations with active Pauli blocking, the blocking probability was found to deviate from the expected reference values. The reason is found in substantial phase-space fluctuations and smearing tied to numerical algorithms and model assumptions in the representation of phase space. This results in the reduction of the blocking probability in most transport codes, so that the simulated system gradually evolves away from the Fermi-Dirac toward a Boltzmann distribution. Since the numerical fluctuations are weaker in the Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck codes, the Fermi-Dirac statistics is maintained there for a longer time than in the quantum molecular dynamics codes. As a result of this investigation, we are able to make judgements about the most effective strategies in transport simulations for determining the collision probabilities and the Pauli blocking. Investigation in a similar vein of other ingredients in transport calculations, like the mean-field propagation or the production of nucleon resonances and mesons, will be discussed in the future publications.

Transport simulations are very valuable for extracting physics information from heavy-ion collision experiments. With the emergence of many different transport codes in recent years, it becomes important to estimate their robustness in extracting physics information from experiments. We report on the results of a transport code comparison project. 18 commonly used transport codes were included in this comparison: 9 Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck-type codes and 9 Quantum-MolecularDynamics-type codes. These codes have been required to simulate Au+Au collisions using the same physics input for mean fields and for in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross sections, as well as the same initialization set-up, the impact parameter, and other calculational parameters at 100 and 400 AMeV incident energy. Among the codes we compare one-body observables such as rapidity and transverse flow distributions. We also monitor non-observables such as the initialization of the internal states of colliding nuclei and their stability, the collision rates and the Pauli blocking. We find that not completely identical initializations constitute partly for different evolutions. Different strategies to determine the collision probabilities, and to enforce the Pauli blocking, also produce considerably different results. There is a substantial spread in the predictions for the observables, which is much smaller at the higher incident energy. We quantify the uncertainties in the collective flow resulting from the simulation alone as about 30% at 100 AMeV and 13% at 400 AMeV, respectively. We propose further steps within the code comparison project to test the different aspects of transport simulations in a box calculation of infinite nuclear matter. This should, in particular, improve the robustness of transport model predictions at lower incident energies where abundant amounts of data are available.

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