Percolation approach to phase transitions in high energy nuclear collisions

We study continuum percolation in nuclear collisions for the realistic case in which the nuclear matter distribution is not uniform over the collision volume, whose finite size is considered, and show that the percolation thr eshold is increased compared to the standard, uniform situation. In terms o f quark-gluon plasma formation this means that the phase transition thresho ld is pushed to higher energies. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V . All rights reserved.