13–19 May 2018
Venice, Italy
Europe/Zurich timezone
The organisers warmly thank all participants for such a lively QM2018! See you in China in 2019!

Hidden strangeness shines in NA61/SHINE

16 May 2018, 12:10
20m
Sala Mosaici-2, 3rd Floor (Palazzo del Casinò)

Sala Mosaici-2, 3rd Floor

Palazzo del Casinò

Parallel Talk Phase diagram and search for the critical point Phase diagram and search for the critical point

Speaker

Antoni Marcinek (Polish Academy of Sciences (PL))

Description

One of the main objectives of the NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN SPS is to
study properties of strongly interacting matter (SIM). This includes a
two-dimensional scan in the beam momentum and size of the colliding system, to
investigate the onset of deconfinement discovered by NA49, and to search for
the critical point of SIM. This contribution presents first ever results on
$\phi$ meson production in proton-proton collisions, the smallest system in the
scan, at beam momenta of 40 and 80 GeV/c, and most detailed ever
experimental data at 158 GeV/c.

Strangeness production enhancement in large systems compared to small ones is
traditionally considered as a signal of quark-gluon plasma formation. To
discuss the nature of the enhancement it is important to compare this effect in
both the open and hidden strangeness sector which is done in this contribution.
The comparison of $p + p$ to Pb $+$ Pb results shows also a non-trivial system size
dependence of the longitudinal evolution of hidden strangeness production,
contrasting with that of other mesons.

The results are furthermore compared to world data on $\phi$ meson production
demonstrating superior accuracy, and to several models. The latter include a
statistical and three microscopic models. None is found to be able to describe
simultaneously the shapes of transverse momentum spectra, shapes of rapidity
distributions and total yields.

Content type Experiment
Collaboration NA61/SHINE
Centralised submission by Collaboration Presenter name already specified

Primary author

Antoni Marcinek (Polish Academy of Sciences (PL))

Presentation materials