Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum XI

Study of strange mesons in p+p, d+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at 200 GeV in PHENIX experiment at RHIC

9 Sept 2014, 18:50

1h 30m

Levinson Lounge

Poster Poster Session Poster Session

Speaker

Dmitry Kotov (SPbSPU)

Description

Strange hadrons are among the most interesting probes of the quark-gluon-plasma, created in the collisions of heavy ions at relativistic energy. The PHENIX experiment at RHIC has measured invariant transverse momentum spectra and nuclear modification factor ($R_{AA}$) of strange mesons $K^{*0}$ and $K^{0}_{S}$, in $p$+$p$, $d$+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at center of mass energy 200 GeV. The invariant transverse momentum spectra for $K^{*0}$ ($K^{0}_{S}$) is measured over a range of transverse momentum ($p_T$) from 1.1--1.4 GeV/c to 8--8.5 GeV/c (2--3 GeV/c to 12--13 GeV/c) depending on the collision systems. Similar to the other light-quark mesons measurements, both these strange mesons show no cold-nuclear-matter effects in the measured $p_T$ range in $d$+Au collisions. The ($R_{dAu}$) factor $\sim$ 1 and is almost constant as a function of $p_T$. It is interesting to have the quantitative study of ($R_{CuCu}$) of the strange mesons ($K^{*0}$, $K^{0}_{S}$) in heavy ion collisions as a function of centrality. In case of peripheral collisions, no suppression are registered with respect to the $p$+$p$ yield scaled with binary collisions. Where as in central collisions, both mesons suffer substantial amount of suppression at high $p_T$ (> 5 GeV/c), which is similar to the suppression suffered by light-quark mesons. In the intermediate $p_T$ range (2 < $p_T$ < 5 (GeV/c)), the strange mesons are less suppressed than the light-quark meson ($\pi^{0}$) and more suppressed than the baryons ($p$, $\bar{p}$).