Impact of string interactions on the space-time evolution of hadronic vertices

Abstract: We investigate the space-time picture of string evolution and hadron production in a fully string-based model for high energy collisions involving heavy ions. We find that although the density strings is quite large at the time of hadronization in a central heavy ion collision, the initial overlap between them right after the collisions is not necessarily large. We also find that when including string--string interactions using the so-called shoving model, the density of strings is decreased which should dampen the rapid increase in string tension in the rope hadronization with multiplicity that we found in a previous paper.