USING THE NUCLEAR REMNANTS AS A NEW SOURCE OF INFORMATION ON THE SPACE-TIME EVOLUTION OF ULTRARELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLISIONS

In nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energy (typically in the range of a few or more GeV per nucleon pair in the collision c.m.s.), one usually identifies two different "zones" in the reaction: the participant zone, created by the nucleons directly participating in the reaction, and the two spectator systems - the two nuclear remnants which do not participate directly to the collision. In this work, we investigate the possibility of using the electromagnetic interaction induced by the two spectator systems as a new source of information on the space-time evolution of the participant zone.