Near-threshold K⁺ production in heavy-ion collisions

Within a hadronic transport model we study in detail contributions to kaon yields and momentum spectra from various baryon (resonance)-baryon (resonance) and πN interactions in heavy-ion collisions at beam energies near the free-space kaon production threshold. It is found that the finite lifetime of baryon resonances affects significantly the shape of kaon spectra, and the high energy parts of the kaon spectra are dominated by kaons from πN→ΛK⁺ processes. N^*(1440) resonances are found to contribute about 10% to the kaon yield. Effects of boosting the Fermi momentum distributions of the two colliding nuclei into their center-of-mass frame, centrality of the reaction, as well as the nuclear equation of state on kaon yields, and spectra are also discussed. Model calculations on the K⁺ spectra for the reaction of Au+Au at E_beam/A=1.0 GeV are compared with the experimental data from the KaoS Collaboration.