Transverse flow of nuclear matter in collisions of heavy nuclei at intermediate energies

The Quantum Molecular Dynamics Model (IQMD) is used to investigate the origin of the collective transverse velocity observed in heavy ion experiments. We find that there are three contributions to this effect: initial–final state correlations, potential interactions and collisions. For a given nuclear equation of state (eos) the increase of the transverse velocity with increasing beam energy is caused by the potential part. For a given beam energy the collective transverse velocity is independent of the nuclear eos but the relative contributions of potential and collisions differ. In view of the importance of the potential interactions between the nucleons it is not evident that the similarity of the radial velocities measured for fragments at beam energies below 1 A GeV and that for mesons at beam energies above 2 A GeV is more than accidental.