Speaker
Description
The measurement of $\phi$ mesons provides a unique and complimentary method for exploring properties of the hot and dense medium created in the relativistic heavy ion collisions. It has a relatively small hadronic interaction cross section and is sensitive to the increase of strangeness (strangeness enhancement), a phenomenon associated with soft particles in bulk matter. Measurements in the dilepton channels are especially interesting since leptons interact only electromagnetically, thus carrying the information from their production phase directly to the detector. Measurements in different nucleus-nucleus collisions allow us to perform a systematic study of the nuclear medium effects on $\phi$ meson production. The PHENIX detector provides the capabilities to measure the $\phi$ production in a wide range of transverse momentum and rapidity to study these effects. In this talk, we present measurements of the $\phi$ mesons in a variety of collision systems at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV. In case of small systems, the data are compared with AMPT calculations to study the various cold nuclear medium effects involved in $\phi$ meson production.
| List of tracks | Strangeness production at low baryon densities |
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