Speaker
Description
The PHENIX experiment aims to study the hot and dense state of strongly interacting matter produced in high energy heavy ion collisions, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Measurements of proton production, when contrasted with light meson production, provide excellent opportunities to study the constituent quark number dependence of certain observables. In this talk, we present a systematic study of proton production in heavy ion collisions using the PHENIX experiment, specifically the invariant yield and nuclear modification factors ($𝑅_{𝐴𝐵}$) as a function of transvers momentum in Cu+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV. Comparison with previously obtained results in symmetric collisions like Au+Auenables the study of the influence of collision geometry on proton production. At same number of participants ($N_{part}$) proton $𝑅_{𝐴𝐵}$ in Cu+Au and Au+Au seems to be in agreement. This suggests that proton production scales with the average size of the nuclear overlap region and not depend on the details of its shape. The proton $𝑅_{𝐴𝐵}$ shows less suppression than $\pi^0$ and $\varphi$ -mesons $𝑅_{𝐴𝐵}$ in Cu+Au for most central collisions. This difference between gradually disappears with decreasing centrality. Implications for hadronization will be discussed.
