Speaker
Description
The study of open charm meson production provides an important tool for detailed investigations of the properties of hot and dense matter formed in nucleus-nucleus collisions. In particular, charm meson data is of vivid interest in the context of the phase-transition between confined hadronic matter and the quark-gluon plasma as well as it is needed for interpretation of data on J/$\psi$ production.
The first estimate of the upper limit of mean multiplicity of $D$ and $\bar{D}$ mesons by a direct measurement was done by the NA49 experiment in Pb+Pb collisions at the top SPS energies. The NA38/NA50 and NA60 experiments measured precisely charmonia production at the top SPS energies, i.e. 158A GeV/c corresponding to $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 17.3 GeV for Pb+Pb, via measurements of dimuon production. Moreover, an indirect estimate of open charm was provided.
The first direct observation of $D^0$ signal via it's $D^0 \rightarrow \pi^{+} + K^{-}$ decay channel was done recently by the NA61/SHINE experiment in Pb+Pb collisions at 150A GeV/c in 2016 with new Vertex Detector setup. The NA61/SHINE physics data taking on open charm production in Xe+La and Pb+Pb collisions at 150A GeV/c was conducted in 2017 and 2018.
NA61/SHINE plans a systematic measurements of open charm production in Pb+Pb collisions in the period 2021-2024 after the major detector upgrade conducted during the Long Shutdown 2. The results will be significantly extended by measurements by future experiments at the new facilities – CBM at FAIR, Germany, MPD at NICA, Russia and J-PARC-HI, Japan.
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