Excitation function of nucleon and pion elliptic flow in relativistic heavy-ion collisions - art. no. 011901

Within a relativistic transport model for heavy-ion collisions, we show tha t the recently observed characteristic change from out-of-plane to in-plane elliptic flow of protons in midcentral Au+Au collisions as the incident en ergy increases is consistent with the calculated results using a stiff nucl ear equation of state (K = 380 MeV). We have also studied the elliptical ho w of pions and the transverse momentum dependence of both the nucleon and p ion elliptic flow in order to gain further insight about collision dynamics .