TOPICAL REVIEW: Medium effects in high energy heavy-ion collisions

The change of hadron properties in dense matter based on various theoretical approaches are reviewed. Incorporating these medium effects in the relativistic transport model, which treats consistently the change of hadron masses and energies in dense matter via the scalar and vector fields, heavy-ion collisions at energies available from SIS/GSI, AGS/BNL and SPS/CERN are studied. This model is seen to provide satisfactory explanations for the observed enhancement of kaon, antikaon and antiproton yields as well as soft pions in the transverse direction from the SIS experiments. In the AGS heavy-ion experiments, it can account for the enhanced 0954-3899/22/12/002/img1 ratio, the difference in the slope parameters of the 0954-3899/22/12/002/img2 and 0954-3899/22/12/002/img3 transverse kinetic energy spectra and the lower apparent temperature of antiprotons than that of protons. This model also provides possible explanations for the observed enhancement of low-mass dileptons, phi mesons and antilambdas in heavy-ion collisions at SPS energies. Furthermore, the change of hadron properties in hot dense matter leads to new signatures of the quark - gluon plasma to hadronic matter transition in future ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC/BNL.