Coulomb Distortion of Pion Spectra from Heavy-Ion Collisions

The effects of final-state $\pi$-nucleus electromagnetic interactions in heavy-ion collisions are investigated in a covariant classical formulation. Experimentally observed mid-rapidity peaks in ${\pi }^{+}$ spectra are reproduced by a simple model and are shown to be sensitive to the gross features of the time-dependent nuclear charge distribution.