Heavy Ion Collision Animations

The MIT Heavy Ion Event Display is the visualization of heavy ion collision events generated by the Hijing monte carlo simulation . The main purpose of this visualization is to give a better picture of a typical heavy ion collision event. It is not intended to give any new insight to current research. Rather, it is intended to help correct misconceptions related to the over-simplification of the heavy ion collision event (often by the disregard of special relativity).

The current version, EventDisplay1.0, has the following features. 

Simulations are available as:

Black background:
Normal picture zx_jan122008.avi    zx_jan122008.mpg
Sliced (|y| < 1 fm) in zx plane   
zx_slice_jan122008.avi   zx_slice_jan122008.mpg
Sliced (|z| < 1 fm) in xy plan viewed from the beam direction  
xy_slice_jan122008.avi xy_slice_jan122008.mpg

White background:
Normal picture  zx_feb122008.avi   zx_feb122008.mpg
Sliced (|y| < 1 fm) in zx plane  
zx_slice_feb122008.avi  zx_slice_feb122008.mpg
Sliced (|z| < 1 fm) in xy plan viewed from the beam direction 
xy_slice_feb122008.avi  xy_slice_feb122008.mpg

Address any questions to Wit Busza and/or Andre Yoon and/or Yen-Jie Lee.

The simulation is also intended to highlight some of the points that have not been given enough attention in the past. The visualization is done in four major steps; first three are in the framework of HIROOT (Heavy Ion ROOT) and the last step with VideoMach(TM). 

  1. Generation of an event with various options, eg CM energy, kinds of nuclei, etc.
  2. Determination of the status of the particles (or medium) produced based on the time dilation factor of each particle (described more below). 
  3. Generation of images for a certain time interval (for example, in the unit of 0.1 fm/c)
  4. Conversion of the images to a video 

Since the Hijing monte carlo simulation was not made for visualization of the collision events, information from the simulation is not enough to visualize the entire collision process. The information lacking from the simulation includes the incoming nuclei, the medium produced, hadronization, etc. We fill in this information based on the following assumptions:

Future development might come in several areas for better (closer to reality) visualization of the event. For example: