  Within a relativistic transport (ART) model for heavy-ion collisions, we show
that the recently observed characteristic change from out-of-plane to in-plane
elliptic flow of protons in mid-central Au+Au collisions as the incident energy
increases is consistent with the calculated results using a stiff nuclear
equation of state (K=380 MeV). We have also studied the elliptic flow of pions
and the transverse momentum dependence of both the nucleon and pion elliptic
flow in order to gain further insight about the collision dynamics.
