3,013 research outputs found
Review of SIS Experimental Results on Strangeness
>A review of meson emission in heavy ion collisions at incident energies
around 1 -- 2 GeV is presented. It is shown how the shape of the
spectra and the various particle yields vary with system size, with centrality
and with incident energy. A statistical model assuming thermal and chemical
equilibrium and exact strangeness conservation (i.e. strangeness conservation
per collision) explains most of the observed features.
Emphasis is put onto the study of and emission. In the framework
of this statistical model it is shown that the experimentally observed equality
of and rates at threshold corrected energies is due to a crossing of two excitation functions. Furthermore,
the independence of the to ratio on the number of participating
nucleons observed between 1 and 10 GeV is consistent with this model.
The observed flow effects are beyond the scope of this model.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, Strangeness 2000, V International Conference on
Strangeness in Quark Matter, July, 2000, Berkeley, Californi
On the exact conservation laws in thermal models and the analysis of AGS and SIS experimental results
The production of hadrons in relativistic heavy ion collisions is studied
using a statistical ensemble with thermal and chemical equilibrium. Special
attention is given to exact conservation laws, i.e. certain charges are treated
canonically instead of using the usual grand canonical approach. For small
systems, the exact conservation of baryon number, strangeness and electric
charge is to be taken into account. We have derived compact, analytical
expressions for particle abundances in such ensemble. As an application, the
change in ratios in AGS experiments with different interaction system
sizes is well reproduced. The canonical treatment of three charges becomes
impractical very quickly with increasing system size. Thus, we draw our
attention to exact conservation of strangeness, and treat baryon number and
electric charge grand canonically. We present expressions for particle
abundances in such ensemble as well, and apply them to reproduce the large
variety of particle ratios in GSI SIS 2 A GeV Ni-Ni experiments. At the
energies considered here, the exact strangeness conservation fully accounts for
strange particle suppression, and no extra chemical factor is needed.Comment: Talk given at Strangeness in Quark Matter '98, Padova, Italy (1998).
Submitted to J.Phys. G. 5 pages, 2 figure
The Vector Probe in Heavy-Ion Reactions
We review essential elements in using the channel as a probe for
hot and dense matter as produced in (ultra-) relativistic collisions of heavy
nuclei. The uniqueness of the vector channel resides in the fact that it
directly couples to photons, both real and virtual (dileptons), enabling the
study of thermal radiation and in-medium effects on both light () and heavy () vector mesons. We emphasize the importance
of interrelations between photons and dileptons, and characterize relevant
energy/mass regimes through connections to Quark-Gluon-Plasma emission and
chiral symmetry restoration. Based on critical analysis of our current
understanding of data from fixed-target energies, we identify open key
questions to be addressed.Comment: Invited Talk at the Hot Quarks 2004 Workshop, July 18-24, 2004 (Taos
Valley, NM, USA), 15 pages latex incl 14 figs and iop style files, to appear
in the proceeding
Jets as a Probe of Dense Matter at RHIC
Jet quenching in the matter created in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions
provides a tomographic tool to probe the medium properties. Recent experimental
results on jet production at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) are
reviewed. Jet properties in p+p and d+Au collisions have been measured,
establishing the baseline for studying jet modification in heavy-ion
collisions. Current progress on detailed studies of high transverse momentum
production in Au+Au collisions is discussed, with an emphasis on dihadron
correlation measurements.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. Plenary talk given at 17th International
Conference on Ultra Relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter
2004), Oakland, California, 11-17 Jan 2004. Submitted to J.Phys.
Stimulus-dependent maximum entropy models of neural population codes
Neural populations encode information about their stimulus in a collective
fashion, by joint activity patterns of spiking and silence. A full account of
this mapping from stimulus to neural activity is given by the conditional
probability distribution over neural codewords given the sensory input. To be
able to infer a model for this distribution from large-scale neural recordings,
we introduce a stimulus-dependent maximum entropy (SDME) model---a minimal
extension of the canonical linear-nonlinear model of a single neuron, to a
pairwise-coupled neural population. The model is able to capture the
single-cell response properties as well as the correlations in neural spiking
due to shared stimulus and due to effective neuron-to-neuron connections. Here
we show that in a population of 100 retinal ganglion cells in the salamander
retina responding to temporal white-noise stimuli, dependencies between cells
play an important encoding role. As a result, the SDME model gives a more
accurate account of single cell responses and in particular outperforms
uncoupled models in reproducing the distributions of codewords emitted in
response to a stimulus. We show how the SDME model, in conjunction with static
maximum entropy models of population vocabulary, can be used to estimate
information-theoretic quantities like surprise and information transmission in
a neural population.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure
Latest results from NA60
The NA60 experiment has measured the production of muon pairs and of charged
particles in In+In collisions at a beam energy of 158 AGeV. For invariant
dimuon masses below the phi the space-time averaged rho spectral function was
isolated by a novel procedure. It shows a strong broadening but essentially no
shift in mass. The production of J/psi was measured as a function of the
collision centrality. As in previous experiments studying Pb+Pb collisions an
anomalous supression is observed, setting in at approximately 90 participant
nucleons. Using the charged particles the reaction plane was reconstructed. The
elliptic flow of charged particles increases with pt showing a saturation for
pt > 2GeV/c. For the first time azimuthal distributions for J/psi are shown.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, talk given at the conference "Strangeness in
Quark Matter 2006 (SQM2006)", March 2006, Los Angeles, USA, accepted for
publication in Journal of Physics
First Measurement of the rho Spectral Function in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions
We report on a precision measurement of low-mass muon pairs in 158 AGeV
indium-indium collisions at the CERN SPS. A significant excess of pairs is
observed above the yield expected from neutral meson decays. The unprecedented
sample size of 360 000 dimuons and the good mass resolution of about 2% allow
us to isolate the excess by subtraction of the decay sources. The shape of the
resulting mass spectrum is consistent with a dominant contribution from
pi+pi-->rho-->mu+mu- annihilation. The associated space-time averaged rho
spectral function shows a strong broadening, but essentially no shift in mass.
This may rule out theoretical models linking hadron masse
NA60 results on spectra and the spectral function in In-In collisions
The NA60 experiment at the CERN SPS has studied low-mass muon pairs in 158
AGeV In-In collisions. A strong excess of pairs is observed above the yield
expected from neutral meson decays. The unprecedented sample size of close to
400K events and the good mass resolution of about 2% have made it possible to
isolate the excess by subtraction of the decay sources (keeping the ).
The shape of the resulting mass spectrum exhibits considerable broadening, but
essentially no shift in mass. The acceptance-corrected transverse-momentum
spectra have a shape atypical for radial flow and show a significant mass
dependence, pointing to different sources in different mass regions.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Quark Matter 2006 conference proceeding
First results from NA60 on low mass muon pair production in In-In collisions at 158 GeV/nucleon
The NA60 experiment at the CERN SPS studies dimuon production in
proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions. The combined information from a
novel vertex telescope made of radiation-tolerant silicon pixel detectors and
from the muon spectrometer previously used in NA50 allows for a precise
measurement of the muon vertex and a much improved dimuon mass resolution. We
report on first results from the data taken for Indium-Indium collisions at 158
AGeV/nucleon in 2003, concentrating on a subsample of about 370 000 muon pairs
in the mass range GeV/. The light vector mesons and
are completely resolved, with a mass resolution of about 23 MeV/
at the . The transverse momentum spectra of the are measured over
the continuous range GeV/c; the inverse slope parameter of
the spectra is found to increase with centrality, with an average value of
MeV.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Plenary talk, SQM2004 conference, Cape Town,
South Africa 15-20 September, 2004. To be published in Journal of Physics G:
Nuclear and Particle Physic
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