Modeling Longitudinal Energy Deposition in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Relativistic collisions of heavy nuclei produce small droplets of quark-gluon plasma. In order to extract plasma properties, one needs a model for the initial energy deposition both along the beam direction (longitudinal) and perpendicular to that (transverse). In Ref. [Phys. Rev. C 102, 014909], the longitudinal energy deposition is calculated via nuclear thickness functions. We have written code to reproduce this modeling, and also propose a new calculation making a very different set of assumptions: i.e., that the energy deposit follows a color-string type picture. In this talk we present results from both models at different A+A impact parameters and collisions energies. Such results include longitudinal energy distributions, pseudorapidity-dependent transverse energy distributions, and eccentricity coefficient distributions.