Collisions of heavy nuclei that are accelerated to high energies make it possible to create in the laboratory a nuclear matter with high excitation, large compression, and appreciable difference in the proton and neutron numbers. Knowledge of the properties of nuclear matter under such extreme conditions is not only interesting in itself but also useful in our understanding of astrophysical phenomena such as supernova explosions, neutron star properties, nuclear synthesis, and the evolution of early universe. In this proposal, various theoretical models will be used to study the properties of such a matter. Also, we shall continue to develop a relativistic transport model to describe the space-time evolution of heavy ion collision dynamics by including the predicted properties of hot dense matter, the different behavior between protons and neutrons, and the quark-gluon substructure of the nucleon. The transport model will be useful for studying heavy ion collisions at both existing accelerators and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider being constructed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, as well as the Radioactive Beam Facility that is being proposed. Comparing the theoretical predictions with the experimental observations will allow us to extract information on nuclear matter properties that have not been known before.
