Forward Pion Production from Hadron Collisions at STAR

by Greg Rakness (Penn State University/BNL)

Tuesday 22 Mar 2005, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

40-S2-B01 (CERN)

In contrast to the case for the nucleon, very little is known about the distribution of gluons in nuclei, especially in the region of x<0.01, where x is the fraction of momentum carried by the parton. In a hadron collider, possible ways to access low-x is by increasing the collision energy or by looking at particles produced at forward rapidities, which preferentially selects collisions of large-x quarks with small-x gluons. In this talk, we examine forward particle production at RHIC, focusing on high energy neutral pion production at the STAR experiment at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV and polar angles 3<eta<4. Data from p+p collisions are compared with fixed order perturbative QCD calculations as well as with expectations from PYTHIA. The azimuthal correlations of the forward pi0 with charged hadrons at mid-rapidity will be presented. Data from p+p collisions will compared with exploratory data from d+Au collisions (d-side) to begin to quantify nuclear effects on particle production in a dense gluon field.



Organiser(s): Yiota Foka and Urs Achim Wiedemann
More information: http://home.cern.ch/a/alicedoc/www/chic/

more information more information