Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

In this note, using the simplified colour string model, we study the configuration space distribution of stopped nucleons in heavy-ion collisions. Given this model, we find that the stopped nucleons from the target and the projectile end up separated from each other by a distance which increases with the collision energy. In consequence, for the center-of-mass energies larger than 6 or 10 GeV (depending on the details of the model), it appears that the stopped nucleons are not necessarily in thermal and chemical equilibrium, and the net-baryon density reached is likely not much higher than that already present in the colliding nuclei.