Aspects of Hadron Production in High-Energy Heavy-Ion Physics

Abstract: High-energy heavy-ion collisions provide a unique tool for the study of nuclear matter as a function of temperature and density. WA98 at the CERN SPS recorded data with a 158 A GeV Pb beam on a Pb target in 1996. To cope with the high charged-particle density, a tracking system based on high granularity multi-step avalanche detectors was developed. The results from the first measurement of Delta++ production at this) energy are presented. The PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, took its first data at unprecedented energies during the summer of 2000. The Pad Chamber detector system, designed to provide space points along each track in the spectrometer arms at midrapidity, performed extremely well. Two very different PHENIX analysis topics, based on Pad Chamber data, are presented: charged-particle multiplicity and coherent peripheral interactions.