Medium modification of pion production in low-energy Au+Au collisions

There is a major mismatch between the charged-pion yields in Au+Au collisions at low energies calculated by various transport models and the experimental measured values from the HADES Collaboration. In this work, reasonable improvements on the equation of state, in-medium modification of cross sections, and the influence of the nuclear potential for Δ resonances will be investigated in the framework of the GiBUU transport model. As a result, we demonstrate that theoretical calculations can indeed describe the charged-pion yields measured by HADES for Au+Au collisions rather well, but that a mismatch then remains between calculations and data for the yields of neutral pions extracted from dileptons within the same experiment.