Thermal Hadron Production in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions

We provide a method to test if hadrons produced in high energy heavy ion collisions were emitted at freeze-out from an equilibrium hadron gas. Our considerations are based on an ideal gas at fixed temperature Tf , baryon number density nB, and vanishing total strangeness. The constituents of this gas are all hadron resonances up to a mass of 2 GeV; they are taken to decay according to the experimentally observed branching ratios. The ratios of the various resulting hadron production rates are tabulated as functions of Tf and nB. These tables can be used for the equilibration analysis of any heavy ion data; we illustrate this for some specific cases. 1 Department of Physics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa 2 Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, D-4800 Bielefeld 1, Germany 3 Theory Division, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland CERN-TH.6523/92 BI-TP 92/08 May 1992